Get Images with JWT Authorization Headers for <img /> src

When we load an image using the img element, we do it like this:

<img src="http://example.com/someimages.png" alt="Example Images" />

What happens if the URL http://example.com/someimage.png requires authenticated users to access it using authorization headers (JWT Token)? The image will not load because when we load images using the above example, we only send a simple GET HTTP request to the server. This means that the server will respond with a 401 or similar status code to indicate that the resource is not accessible because we didn't send an authenticated request using JWT. Sometimes, not all static assets are public assets.

I'm not talking about authentication with cookies here because cookies are always sent with every request. In contrast, a JWT token must be set in the Authorization header for every request.

Then, how we do it??

The solution is to use fetch with Authorization Headers to get the images, then transform it to Base64 and display it using img tag. Let's take the example below, I am using vanilla JavaScript and HTML DOM.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <body>
    <img id="image-with-jwt" src="" alt="" />
    <script>
      const getBase64Image = async res => {
        const blob = await res.blob();

        const reader = new FileReader();

        await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
          reader.onload = resolve;
          reader.onerror = reject;
          reader.readAsDataURL(blob);
        });
        return reader.result;
      };

      fetch("http://example.com/authenticatedimages", {
        headers: {
          Authorization: "Bearer yourtoken",
        },
      })
        .then(getBase64Image)
        .then(imgString => {
          document.getElementById("image-with-jwt").src = imgString;
        });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

When you run that code, you can check if the src attributes in the img tags are Base64 string instead of URL for the image. This solution also works in JavaScript framework, such as react. Here's the example code:

const ImagesWithJWT = () => {
  const [imagesString, setImagesString] = useState("");

  const getBase64Image = async res => {
    const blob = await res.blob();

    const reader = new FileReader();

    await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      reader.onload = resolve;
      reader.onerror = reject;
      reader.readAsDataURL(blob);
    });
    return reader.result;
  };

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch("http://example.com/authenticatedimages", {
      headers: {
        Authorization: "Bearer yourtoken",
      },
    })
      .then(getBase64Image)
      .then(imgString => setImagesString(imgString));
  }, []);

  return <img src={imagesString} />;
};

Hope this helps

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Get Images with JWT Authorization Headers for <img /> src

Jafar Aziz

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