Files
lancedb/docs
Brendan Clement 1db0d3ca5f docs: label early access features and hide ones not ready to document (#4855)
Labels early access features and hides features we aren't documenting
yet.

**Early access label:** Functions (4 pages, plus the GPU refresh,
checkpointing and adaptive execution pages), Secrets (3 pages), Tiered
Index Cache, Blob V2, and merge insert, which is labelled for Enterprise
only. Two sidebar titles are shorter so the tag fits.

**Hidden:** branching, JSON columns and geospatial.
- The JSON functions page and the agent branch-experiments tutorial go
in `.mintignore`.
- `tables/branching` stays reachable but out of the nav, as #4859 left
it, because SDK error messages link to it.
- Other pages' mentions of these features become draft comments, so
they're easy to restore.

**Secrets page:** drops references to manual KMS setup, which the
control plane handles. It keeps the encryption-at-rest facts, states the
Azure value-size limit inline, and points a 501 error to support.
2026-11-05 00:13:02 -08:00
..

LanceDB Documentation

For website guides in docs/web, start with Documentation in CONTRIBUTING.md. 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 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. 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.

(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs serve)

If you want to just generate the HTML files:

(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

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