Files
lancedb/docs
Brendan Clement 058dca70b0 docs: describe tag and branch retention as Lance cleanup implements it
The cleanup and guarantees pages said a tag or branch pointing at a pruned
version stops resolving, while the table page said tagged versions are
exempt and quietly kept. The pinned Lance (ae2903729f02, the commit in
Cargo.lock and in Sophon's Lance submodule) keeps a tagged version
whatever its age, but with its default policy refuses to clean up while a
tag points at a version older than the window, raising an error that
names the tag. optimize() passes that default, so it raises after
compacting, prunes nothing and skips its index update until the tag is
deleted. Sophon's cleanup job uses the same default.

Branches are retained separately: cleaning the parent keeps the version a
branch was forked from and the files the branch reads, while the
parent's other old versions are pruned. The pages now say both, checked
locally against the baseline SDK.
2026-10-09 09:11:56 -07:00
..
2026-09-09 15:33:04 +08:00

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

  1. Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide. 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

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 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 for the toolchain setup.

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:

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.

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