How to forward large files with RestTemplate?

Question

I have a web service call through which zip files can be uploaded. The files are then forwarded to another service for storage, unzipping, etc. For now the file is stored on

Answer 1

Edit: The other answers are better (use Resource) https://stackoverflow.com/a/36226006/116509

My original answer:

You can use execute for this kind of low-level operation. In this snippet I've used Commons IO's copy method to copy the input stream. You would need to customize the HttpMessageConverterExtractor for the kind of response you're expecting.

final InputStream fis = new FileInputStream(new File("c:\\autoexec.bat")); // or whatever
final RequestCallback requestCallback = new RequestCallback() {
     @Override
    public void doWithRequest(final ClientHttpRequest request) throws IOException {
        request.getHeaders().add("Content-type", "application/octet-stream");
        IOUtils.copy(fis, request.getBody());
     }
};
final RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory requestFactory = new SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory();
requestFactory.setBufferRequestBody(false);     
restTemplate.setRequestFactory(requestFactory);     
final HttpMessageConverterExtractor responseExtractor =
    new HttpMessageConverterExtractor(String.class, restTemplate.getMessageConverters());
restTemplate.execute("http://localhost:4000", HttpMethod.POST, requestCallback, responseExtractor);

(Thanks to Baz for pointing out you need to call setBufferRequestBody(false) or it will defeat the point)