WebSocket Overview

Overview

The WebSocket gateway delivers independent feed types over one connection: live touchline ticks, market depth, and order-status updates. You connect once, then subscribe to each feed type separately.

Purpose

Use the WebSocket for anything that needs to react to price movement or fills in real time — strategy engines, live dashboards, risk monitors. It replaces polling Market Quotes or Order Book in a loop.

Connection flow

1. Open a WebSocket connection to wss://api.shoonya.com/NorenWSAPI/.
2. Send a connect frame (t: "a") with uid, actid, source, and accesstoken.
3. Wait for the connect acknowledgment (t: "ak") and check s is "Ok" before subscribing to anything.
4. Send subscribe frames for touchline and/or order updates.
5. Handle incoming ticks; respond to server pings to keep the session alive.

Connect request (t: 'a')

{
  "t": "a",
  "uid": "AB1234",
  "actid": "AB1234",
  "source": "API",
  "accesstoken": "Acesstoken"
}

Connect acknowledgment (t: 'ak')

{ "t": "ak", "uid": "AB1234", "s": "Ok" }

Request example

import websocket, json

def on_open(ws):
    ws.send(json.dumps({
        "t": "a",
        "uid": UID,
        "actid": ACTID,
        "source": "API",
        "accesstoken": Acesstoken,
    }))

def on_message(ws, message):
    print(json.loads(message))

ws = websocket.WebSocketApp(
    "wss://api.shoonya.com/NorenWSAPI/",
    on_open=on_open, on_message=on_message,
)
ws.run_forever()

const ws = new WebSocket("wss://api.shoonya.com/NorenWSAPI/");

ws.onopen = () => ws.send(JSON.stringify({
  t: "a", uid, actid, source: "API", accesstoken: Acesstoken,
}));
ws.onmessage = (event) => console.log(JSON.parse(event.data));

# WebSocket connections aren't expressible in cURL —
# use `websocat` for a quick command-line test:
websocat wss://api.shoonya.com/NorenWSAPI/

Error handling

Best practices

• Run one WebSocket connection per process; multiplex symbols over it rather than opening one socket per instrument.
• Process incoming ticks on a separate thread/queue from your order-placement logic so a slow strategy calculation never blocks the read loop.
• Always check s: "Ok" on the connect ack before subscribing — subscribing on a failed connect silently produces no data.

Python example

from shoonya_api import ShoonyaFeed

feed = ShoonyaFeed(uid=UID, actid=ACTID, session_token=Acesstoken)
feed.on_tick = lambda tick: print(tick.token, tick.ltp)
feed.connect()
feed.subscribe(["NSE|2885"])

Notes

See Subscribe to Market Feed and Order Update Feed for the exact frame formats of each subscription type.