Returning Images From Micronaut Controllers

This week I was browsing the Micronaut Gitter channel and saw a question about how to return a BufferedImage from a Micronaut controller. This isn’t something I’ve done before and it instantly nerd snipped me:

I am looking for help on how to make a controller method respond with a BufferedImage. Any ideas ?

I had a quick google, and it turns out you don’t need a buffered image at all. I found a few references to returning a byte array from a controller, so I quickly span up a new service from Micronaut Launch, added a controller with an endpoint that loaded an image from the classpath returned it as a byte array:

import io.micronaut.http.MediaType
import io.micronaut.http.annotation.Controller
import io.micronaut.http.annotation.Get
import io.micronaut.http.annotation.Produces

@Controller("/buffered-image")
class BufferedImageController {

  // create a controller method that will return a byte array, turns out we don't need to return a
  // BufferedImage after all
  @Get
  @Produces(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG) // Adjust the media type based on the image format
  fun loadImage(): ByteArray {
    val imageStream =
        javaClass.getResourceAsStream("/images/astronaut.jpeg")
            ?: error("Image could not be found") // Replace with your image path
    return imageStream.readBytes()
  }
}

Specifying the @Produces(MediaType.IMAGE_JPEG) allows the client to undertand what type of data is being returned and render the image correctly.

That was all I needed to do, and I was able to hit the endpoint and see the image rendered in postman:

Postman screenshot showing the image returned from the controller

The repo with all the source code is here if you want to take a look

Returning Images From Micronaut Controllers

How to load an image from the classpath and return it from a Micronaut controller

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