AWS API Gateway and Lambda to return image

Question

Say I have this HTML:

What I would like to do is have example.com/pic map to an AWS API Gateway end

Answer 1

It currently isn't possible because you cannot return binary data through the AWS API Gateway.

For this to work, the lambda function would need to return the image data as binary blob, and some meta-information such as the image content type. Then, AWS API Gateway would need to be able to map this to the HTTP response. For example:-

lambda returns: { contentType: 'image/png', image: "encoded binary data" }

then API gateway would need to map contentType to the 'content-type' header of the response, and put the image data in the body of the response with the right encoding and length.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do this right now. It only maps text encodings like application/json or application/xml as the response type (it is designed for APIs after all).

You could very easily achieve this using ElasticBeanstalk where you have a lot more control over the http response.