How to download image via gRPC Gateway?

Question

I want to serve files(images) via gRPC Gateway from gRPC server. Since protocol buffers messages have sctructure, I don't see how I could ensure the gateway to send content of the bytes field of the response message instead of the entire json-encoded message. Is there a native solution for this or does one simply have to write a dedicated http muxer to handle these requests?

Answer 1

Rather than sending arbitrarily-sized files (probably as bytes), it would probably be better to include a URL to the file in the message and then host/serve the file over HTTP (e.g. from S3, Google Cloud Storage etc. from which you could generate signed URLs to limit access).

I think the max message size is 2GB (source?) and the recommendation (Large Data Sets) is to consider alternative techniques once messages sizes exceed few MBs.