Jack Ye
c0fe2eacda
The feature engineering documentation describes the geneva package, a separate SDK. The capability it covers now lives in this client — materialized views, computed columns, and registered functions are all shipped API with no pages describing them. Four pages cover the three mechanisms and, more usefully, when each applies. The overview leads with that choice rather than with concepts, because the mechanisms overlap and picking the wrong one is the expensive mistake. Two things they say plainly that the API reference cannot: Declaring and filling are separate everywhere, and filling never revisits a row it has already done. That makes refreshes idempotent and appends cheap, and it means a filled value does not track its inputs — surprising if you expect a spreadsheet, so it is stated rather than left to be discovered. The availability split runs the opposite way to expectation. Materialized views are local only and raise on a remote connection; functions are Cloud and Enterprise only and raise on a local one. Someone reading about both in one sitting will otherwise assume the usual direction and be wrong in one of them. Examples are the tested ones from the docstrings, so they cannot drift from the behaviour they describe. The training and tutorial pages that pointed into the geneva documentation now point here.
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