Jack Ye
19f8f396ec
Ten merges and renames, all in one direction: fewer pages, each covering a whole subject. Table absorbs schema evolution and versioning. Vector search absorbs multi-vector. Explain absorbs explain analyze. Reranking was seven pages -- an overview and six rerankers of a few dozen lines each -- and is now one. The vector index page absorbs quantization, which was only ever a parameter of it. Indexing moves to Manage, where the other catalog objects are. The operational half stays in Operate as one Indexing page, absorbing GPU indexing -- which was filed in sophon despite importing lancedb's snippets and being mostly open-source content with one Enterprise-badged section. Performance was a single page aggregating tips for four unrelated operations, which is hard to keep current. Each section now sits with the operation it is about: ingestion tips on Insert, index tips on Indexing, compaction tips on Compaction, query tips on Search. Data Types leaves Concepts. The type reference belongs in the SQL reference, which already described the same types from the query side; Table now carries a short summary that points there. The multimodal material it had absorbed is its own page again, since storing blobs is a task rather than a type definition. Query becomes Semantic Search, Branches becomes Branch, and the Enterprise Security page becomes Compliance. Redirects cover every moved URL, and 30 files were repointed at the merged anchors.
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 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