The bindings are built, installed and published with pnpm everywhere,
but a parallel npm dependency graph was still being maintained beside
it. This removes it, raises the supported Node floor to the versions we
actually test, and gives Dependabot the npm coverage it was missing.
## Dropping npm
`nodejs/package-lock.json` was regenerated by `ci/update_lockfiles.sh`
on every release commit and read by nothing — no workflow runs `npm ci`
or `npm install` in `nodejs/`, and npm never publishes a lockfile in a
package tarball. It could not even agree with the real install, since
npm does not see pnpm's `overrides`. Because GitHub's dependency graph
parses `package-lock.json`, it was also reporting vulnerabilities for a
tree we neither install nor ship.
`docs/package.json`, `docs/package-lock.json` and `docs/tsconfig.json`
go too. They depend on `file:../node` and
`file:../node/node_modules/apache-arrow` — the `node/` directory was
removed long ago — the tsconfig compiles `src/*.ts` where no TypeScript
files exist, and nothing installs any of it. `docs.yml` only referenced
the lockfile to configure an npm cache for an install it never ran.
Two `workflow_dispatch` workflows for regenerating those lockfiles are
removed as well. Both were already broken: they `uses:` composite
actions at `.github/workflows/update_package_lock{,_nodejs}` that do not
exist, so dispatching either failed immediately.
The remaining `npx` calls become direct `node_modules/.bin/...`
invocations. These were already running locally installed binaries
rather than resolving anything, but naming the binary removes the npm
CLI from the loop and does not depend on which Node version is active.
`dev.yml`'s commitlint check was the last place doing real npm
dependency resolution — an unpinned `npm install
@commitlint/config-conventional` that also bypassed the
`minimumReleaseAge` hold configured for `nodejs/` — and is now a pinned
`pnpm dlx`.
## Node support
Node 18 and 20 both reached end-of-life, in April 2025 and April 2026.
The matrix moves to 22, 24 and 26, and `engines` rises from `>= 18` to
`>= 22` so the declared floor is one the matrix actually covers. Node 22
is LTS until April 2027; 24 is LTS; 26 is Current and becomes LTS in
October 2026.
This also removes the reason the workflows reached for `npx` in the
first place: pnpm 11 requires Node >= 22.13, which every matrix version
now satisfies.
The prebuilt-binary smoke test in `npm-publish.yml` moves from Node 20
to Node 22 — the floor, where a napi ABI problem would surface first —
rather than fanning out across all three, to keep the publish matrix
from tripling.
## Dependabot
There were no npm-ecosystem entries at all, which is why the advisories
behind #4073 went unnoticed. Both pnpm lockfiles are now watched —
`nodejs/` and `nodejs/examples/`, which is a separate install — using
the same `lockfile-only` strategy as the existing cargo and pip entries,
so version ranges in `package.json` are left alone.
## Pre-commit biome
The hook ran `npx @biomejs/biome@1.8.3` while `nodejs/package.json`
resolved 1.9.4. The two disagree about formatting, so the hook rejected
code that `pnpm lint` accepts, and failed on unmodified `main` for
anyone touching `nodejs/`. It now uses the pnpm-managed biome, which
fixes the drift with no source changes.
## Testing
`dev.yml`'s commitlint job does not check out the repo, so it runs in an
empty workspace, and I could not verify `pnpm/action-setup` there
locally. It triggers on `pull_request_target`, so this PR exercises it
directly — worth confirming green before merge. I did verify the `pnpm
dlx` invocation itself locally: it accepts a conventional title and
rejects a non-conventional one with exit 1.
Node 26 is new enough that the examples job may surface gaps in prebuilt
native binaries (`onnxruntime-node`, `sharp`) before their maintainers
publish for it.
## Not included
`nodejs/examples/` still pins `sharp: "0.33.5"` and has its own audit
findings. Raising the Node floor unblocks that work — sharp 0.35
requires Node >= 20.9, which the matrix now satisfies — but it is a
dependency bump rather than tooling cleanup, so it is left separate.
## Breaking changes
`@lancedb/lancedb` now requires Node >= 22; previously >= 18. The
`@types/node` peer range moves from `>=18` to `>=22` to match. Users on
Node 18 or 20 must upgrade their runtime; both have been end-of-life for
some time. Existing installs are unaffected, since `engines` is only
checked on install.
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Local benchmarks currently inherit the release profile's fat LTO and
single codegen unit, making local iteration pay release-artifact build
costs.
Provide repository-defined profiles for no-LTO local work and cheaper
benchmark builds, and document when each profile is appropriate. Release
artifacts continue to use fat LTO.
`docs/src/python/python.md` is the whole Python API reference, but it is
maintained by hand and had drifted from the public API. Anything not
listed there simply doesn't get rendered, so a number of public,
documented, tested APIs were invisible to users — most notably branch
management, where `diff` and `merge` live.
I audited every public symbol reachable from `lancedb` and its
subpackages against the `:::` directives on the page. This adds the
missing ones:
- **Branching** — `Branches`, `AsyncBranches` (`list` / `create` /
`checkout` / `delete` / `diff` / `merge`)
- **Tables** — `TableStatistics` (returned by `Table.stats()`; the
fragment-level stats classes were already listed)
- **Full text queries** — `FullTextQuery`, `MatchQuery`, `PhraseQuery`,
`BoostQuery`, `MultiMatchQuery`, `BooleanQuery`, `FullTextOperator`,
`Occur`
- **Querying** — `LanceEmptyQueryBuilder`, `LanceTakeQueryBuilder`,
`AsyncTakeQuery`
- **Indices** — `Fm` (the FM-index for substring search), `IndexConfig`
- **Blobs** — `blob`, `BlobType`, `BlobFile`
- **Namespaces** — `connect_namespace`, `connect_namespace_async`, and
both namespace connection classes
- **Remote config** — `TlsConfig`, `HeaderProvider`, `OAuthConfig`,
`OAuthFlowType`
- **Rerankers** — the `Reranker` base class plus `JinaReranker`,
`RRFReranker`, `MRRReranker`, `AnswerdotaiRerankers`,
`VoyageAIReranker`, `WatsonxReranker` (5 of 12 were listed)
- **Embeddings** — `get_registry`, `register`, and the 14 embedding
functions that were missing (3 of 17 were listed)
- **PyTorch** — `StreamingDataset` and the permutation API it is built
on
- **Misc** — `Session`, `tokenize`, `FtsToken`, `pydantic.Vector`,
`pydantic.MultiVector`, `instrument_lancedb_metrics`, and the two
exception types
It also repairs cross-references in docstrings that no longer resolve:
links into guide pages that have since moved to lancedb.com
(`querying-an-ann-index`, `experimental-full-text-search`),
`lance.dataset` references with no inventory behind them, and the
relative targets `[Table](Table)` and `[PyArrow Table](pyarrow.Table)`.
Deliberately left out: concrete implementation classes reached through
their abstract base (`LanceTable`, `LanceDBConnection`,
`RemoteDBConnection`), query base classes already covered by
`inherited_members: true`, and internal plumbing such as
`FullTextSearchQuery` and `ColumnOrdering`.
## Testing
The docs job only runs on pushes to `main`, so I built the site locally
and compared against a build of `upstream/main`: every added entry
resolves, and no symbol that was rendered before stopped being rendered
when the four packages moved to automodule. `mkdocs build --strict`
exits 0 on this branch, against 61 warnings on `main`.
## Also in this PR
`lancedb.index`, `lancedb.embeddings`, `lancedb.remote` and
`lancedb.rerankers` are now rendered by a single mkdocstrings directive
each, driven by the module's `__all__`, rather than a hand-maintained
list. These four are where most of the drift was, and `__all__` is
harder to forget than a docs page. `lancedb.embeddings` had no
`__all__`; without one mkdocstrings renders no members at all for a
re-export package, so one is added. AGENTS.md gains a section on how the
page is wired up and how to build the docs locally.
Rendering all that code for the first time surfaced ~100 more build
warnings, which would have made #3707 (turning on `mkdocs build
--strict`) harder to land, so the warning backlog is cleared here too.
97 of the 158 warnings were one systematic false positive — griffe
cannot see the generated `__init__` of a pydantic dataclass, so every
documented parameter looks unknown — switched off via
`warn_unknown_params`. The remaining 61 came from 15 docstrings with
real bugs: prose trailing a `Parameters` section (we were rendering
parameters called `The`, `you` and `To`), types dropped because numpydoc
needs spaces around the colon, `num_partitions, default sqrt(num_rows)`
parsing as a list of names and inventing a `default` parameter, and one
parameter indented five spaces. `mkdocs build --strict` now exits 0.
---
#3747 (the coverage test that keeps this from happening again) is
stacked on this branch, so review it after this one.
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This updates the agent instructions to codify the CI gates that failed
before code review started: PR titles must satisfy Conventional Commits,
and Python changes need root-level ruff format/lint checks.
It also makes the touched-language preflight explicit so mixed Rust,
Python, and TypeScript changes run the checks CI expects before opening
a PR.
Will Jones
Xuanwo