Publishing a hosted feature service using a shapefile or CSV file

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Publishing hosted services requires an account with that is part of an ArcGIS Online organization. See Getting started for more information.

To web-enable large feature datasets from shapefiles (packaged in a .zip file) or comma-separated value (CSV) files, you can upload your files to Esri's cloud and have them hosted as services. This is a useful workflow if you do not have any ArcGIS products installed locally.

The steps below outline how to publish hosted feature services from the ArcGIS.com website using a shapefile or CSV file. The feature service gets published in the WGS 1984 Web Mercator (Auxiliary Sphere) coordinate system. Uploads over 5 GB in size are not supported and will result in an error.

Steps:

1. Verify that you are signed in and that you are a publisher of your organization. If you have a large file to publish, you should check Keep me signed in when signing in. This helps prevent the website from timing out before the service has been created.
2. Open My Content and click the Add Item button.

   The Add Item window appears.

3. Choose On my Computer from the The item is options.
4. Click the Choose File button and choose the file on your computer.

Shapefiles must be compressed as a .zip file containing .shp, .shx, .dbf, and .prj files. If there are multiple shapefiles in the .zip file, they will all be included in the feature service.

CSV files need to contain address information or latitude-longitude coordinates in decimal degrees. CSV files must be formatted and saved as .csv. Other text-based file types cannot be published.

5. Type a title.
6. Type tags. Alternatively, you can click the Choose from your tags link to open the list of tags you've used previously and choose the tags you want to use for this item.

   Tags are words or short phrases that describe your item and improve its findability. Separate your terms with commas. Federal land is considered one tag, while Federal, land is considered two tags.

7. Check the box next to Publish this file as a feature service.

   If you leave the box unchecked, your data file is added to My Content but no feature service is created. You can publish a feature service later if you want. See Adding files from your computer for more information.

8. Choose to locate the features using latitude-longitude or address.

   By default, ArcGIS Online geocodes addresses based on your organization's region.

9. To change the country that ArcGIS Online uses to geocode your addresses, select a different country from the Country drop-down list. If your file contains addresses from multiple countries or from a country not in the list, select World.
10. Review the field types and location fields.
    1. Click a Field Type cell to choose a different type.
    2. Click a Location Field cell to choose a different field.
11. Click the Add Item button.

Your file is published as a service. It may take some time to upload the file. One way to test the new service is to view it in the ArcGIS.com map viewer.

The data file and the service are separately added to My Content. You can edit item details, and share the items. The items are independent, so for example, if you change the thumbnail in the service's item details, the thumbnail does not update on the file's item details.