# LanceDB Documentation

For website guides in `docs/web`, start with
[Documentation in CONTRIBUTING.md](../CONTRIBUTING.md#documentation). That
covers editing pages, generated examples, previews, availability and drafts.

This page covers the SDK reference in `docs/src`, built with MkDocs. Its
[GitHub Actions workflow](../.github/workflows/docs.yml) builds and deploys on
pushes to `main`, so it can include unreleased APIs. That is separate from the
release editions of the Mintlify website.

## Building the docs

### Setup
1. Install LanceDB Python. See setup in [Python contributing guide](../python/CONTRIBUTING.md).
   Run `make develop` to install the Python package.
2. Install documentation dependencies. From LanceDB repo root: `pip install -r docs/requirements.txt`

### Preview the docs

Run these commands from the LanceDB repository root. The subshell changes into
`docs` to load `mkdocs.yml`, while leaving your shell in the repository root.

```shell
(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs serve)
```

If you want to just generate the HTML files:

```shell
(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs build)
```

If successful, you should see a `docs/site` directory in the repository root that
you can verify locally.

## Adding examples

To make sure examples are correct, we put examples in test files so they can be
run as part of our test suites.

You can see the tests are at:

* Python: `python/python/tests/docs`
* Typescript: `nodejs/examples/`

### Checking python examples

```shell
cd python
pytest -vv python/tests/docs
```

### Checking typescript examples

The examples depend on `@lancedb/lancedb` at `file:../dist`, so the package must be
built before running the tests. This uses pnpm; see the
[Typescript contributing guide](../nodejs/CONTRIBUTING.md) for the toolchain setup.

```shell
pushd nodejs
pnpm install
pnpm build
popd
```

Then you can run the examples by going to the `nodejs/examples` directory, which is a
separate pnpm package with its own lockfile:

```shell
pushd nodejs/examples
pnpm install
pnpm test
popd
```

## API documentation

### Python

The Python API documentation is organized based on the file `docs/src/python/python.md`.
We manually add entries there so we can control the organization of the reference page.
**However, this means any new types must be manually added to the file.** No additional
steps are needed to generate the API documentation.

### Typescript

The typescript API documentation is generated from the typescript source code using [typedoc](https://typedoc.org/).

When new APIs are added, you must manually re-run the typedoc command to update the API documentation.
The new files should be checked into the repository.

```shell
pushd nodejs
# `pnpm docs` would invoke pnpm's built-in `docs` command, not the script.
pnpm run docs
popd
```