For a side project I needed something that turned out to be weirdly hard to find: a free, clean list of the world's seaports — real depths, coordinates, and the codes ships actually use. Everything out there was paywalled, login-walled, or a table that looked untouched since 2005.
So I built the thing I wanted. Then it grew: The Port Index — 3,804 seaports and 9,640 airports, free, no signup, and the whole dataset downloadable as CSV/JSON. Here's what I learned building it.
The data is all public domain — you just have to find it
No scraping, no licensing fees. Three public-domain sources do the heavy lifting:
NGA World Port Index (Pub 150) — a U.S. government dataset of ~4,000 ports, each with 100+ coded attributes (depths, max vessel size, pilotage, facilities…).
