Ok so here’s how I figured this out. It all has to do with CORS policy. Before the POST request, Chrome was doing a preflight OPTIONS request, which should be handled and acknowledged by the server prior to the actual request. Now this is really not what I wanted for such a simple server. Hence, resetting the headers client side prevents the preflight:
app.config(function ($httpProvider) {
$httpProvider.defaults.headers.common = {};
$httpProvider.defaults.headers.post = {};
$httpProvider.defaults.headers.put = {};
$httpProvider.defaults.headers.patch = {};
});
The browser will now send a POST directly. Hope this helps a lot of folks out there… My real problem was not understanding CORS enough.
Link to a great explanation: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/cors/
Kudos to this answer for showing me the way. AngularJS POST Fails: Response for preflight has invalid HTTP status code 404