Connect to aisstream.io

[SimonGIS]

https://aisstream.io/  provide free AIS data.  

I know there is a Geoevent stream service that allows access to a specific AOI, but I was hoping to setup a Velocity feed that would ingest this feed.

The documentation states:

creating a websocket connection to wss://stream.aisstream.io/v0/stream and sending a json subscription message. This message includes your api key and the geographic bounding boxes you wish to receive AIS data.

I don't see any options for authentication when ingesting a websocket.  Would this type of feed be possible to ingest?

[PeterNasuti]

@SimonGIS Thanks for your post and for raising this need! Currently the ArcGIS Velocity WebSocket feed type does not support authentication. 

I have entered an item on our side for the Velocity team to research expanding this functionality to offer a user-configurable JSON subscription message as well as exploring other authentication options to expose for this feed type.

[SeanOBriain]

Hi Simon, I'd a similar issue, did you find a workaround?

and Peter, was there any progress on his feature?

[PeterNasuti]

We added custom headers support for WebSocket feed type a few releases back. Mostly, I have seen APIs that use API key passed in a custom header as the authentication mechanism for WebSocket. Does this meet your use case?

Something with multi-step custom authentication responses is less commonly witnessed and unlikely to be implemented in ArcGIS Velocity in the near-term.

[PeterNasuti]

@SimonGIS @SeanOBriain As an update on this thread, for the Velocity 6.2 release (late June 2025) we are adding a subscription message element to the WebSocket feed type. We are also adding a parameter "ignore first message received" for cases where the API returns a subscription confirmation message before data flows.

However, I have seen with this WebSocket AIS stream provider independent of Velocity that it sends disconnect messages every two minutes or so (even testing with postman). Velocity automatically reestablishes the connection but thought you should be aware to investigate the disconnects further with them.