The docs have no link checking at all, so external links rot silently: a trial run already found `docs/src/python/python.md` pointing at `lancedb.github.io/lance-namespace`, which returns 404 since the repository moved to the lance-format org. Checking external links on the blocking path would be the wrong trade: third-party hosts rate-limit automated clients, reject non-browser user agents, and go down temporarily, so any of them having a bad minute would turn unrelated PRs red. Following lance-format/lance#8315, this adds a daily `lychee` run that reports broken links into a single tracking issue, rewritten in place on each run and closed automatically once every link resolves. The scan job runs the downloaded lychee binary with a read-only token; everything that writes lives in a separate report job, and a non-verdict lychee exit fails the run instead of publishing a bogus report. The check is restricted to http(s) links because much of `docs/src` is generated API reference (the `js/` tree comes from `npm run docs`) and the hand-written pages use mkdocstrings cross-references and nav-relative paths that only resolve in the site mkdocs builds, so relative links would be reported as broken on every run. The one broken link the trial run surfaced is fixed here; after the fix, a local run over all 154 files reports 0 errors across 216 unique links.
LanceDB Documentation
LanceDB docs are available at docs.lancedb.com.
The SDK docs are built and deployed automatically by Github Actions
whenever a commit is pushed to the main branch. So it is possible for the docs to show
unreleased features.
Building the docs
Setup
- Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide.
Run
make developto install the Python package. - Install documentation dependencies. From LanceDB repo root:
pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
Preview the docs
cd docs
mkdocs serve
If you want to just generate the HTML files:
PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs build -f docs/mkdocs.yml
If successful, you should see a docs/site directory 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
cd python
pytest -vv python/tests/docs
Checking typescript examples
The @lancedb/lancedb package must be built before running the tests:
pushd nodejs
npm ci
npm run build
popd
Then you can run the examples by going to the nodejs/examples directory and
running the tests like a normal npm package:
pushd nodejs/examples
npm ci
npm 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.
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.
pushd nodejs
npm run docs
popd