Files
lancedb/docs
Brendan Clement 622e6078c1 docs: describe materialized-view refresh as a full rebuild
Main now rebuilds a materialized view completely on every refresh
(#4373): there is no incremental mode, no `full` argument and no
stable-row-ID requirement on the source. The example ran against the
SDK built from this branch (0.40.0b13) failed, because a refresh after
adding Bea writes both matching rows, not one.

The example now creates its source with the default options and expects
two rows written by the refresh, and its generated snippet is
regenerated. Separate tests cover `with_no_data` (one matching row on
the first refresh) and refreshing to an earlier source version. The
refresh page explains the full rebuild and keeps the #incremental and
#stable-row-ids anchors for the sections that replace them. Its version
note now says what the published 0.39.0 does differently, as observed
with that release.

The management, table, database, limits, architecture and data-types
pages no longer say a view's source needs stable row ids, and the
feature-engineering and tutorial summaries no longer call refreshes
incremental.
2026-10-06 20:44:06 -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