Quick tip for Cordova and the Browser Platform – Setting a Custom Port

i’m not regularly using cordova and the browser platform because most of the time i’ll use ionic serve instead. however, last night i was working on a cordova project that – shockingly – didn’t use ionic. i needed to run it in a web page to do some quick testing. i quickly discovered that one thing the browser platform does not handle is enabling cors for all requests. i had set up cors for the server part of this application a while ago but it required me to use localhost:3333. by default, cordova will use port 8000 for the port. there wasn’t an obvious way to change that so i did some digging.

the first thing i did was go into the browser folder under platforms. under platforms/browser/cordova i opened up the run file and saw that the script did include the ability to pass in a port argument. i couldn’t figure out how to pass it though so i tried doing run -h :

ok, that’s simple. i confirmed it worked by doing cordova/run --port=3333 . sweet. but how do it via the “main” cordova cli? if you run cordova help run , you’ll see this nugget in the docs:

so basically, this is all you need to do: cordova run browser -- --port=3333 . simple, right? probably everyone but me knew this, but as i had to dig to figure it out, i thought it made sense to blog it.