Jack Ye
83595ac839
Basics gains a Schema & Data Types section -- the Arrow types a table can hold, the extension types Lance adds on top (lance.json, lance.blob.v2, lance.bfloat16), and where geospatial actually stands. The multimodal page moves in beside it. Consistency joins Basics too, after Query & Job. Query & Job now leads with the thing the _async convention actually gives you: a handle. execute_query_async returns a query, everything else returns a job, and both answer the same four questions -- which one, how is it going, give me the result, stop. Only the third differs, because a query produces rows to stream and a job produces an outcome to wait for. Management gains a Materialized View page. Creating one was documented only on the refresh page, and the stable-row-ids requirement is a creation-time decision that cannot be undone. Embeddings move to Integrations as the Embedding Registry, which is what they are -- a client-side feature that wraps provider models, sitting above the providers it registers. The demo gallery was three apps on one page; it is now three pages. Use Cases folds into Tutorials as Tutorials and Use Cases.
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