Files
lancedb/docs
Brendan Clement 486f6c66bb docs: revise getting started and concepts (#4491)
This PR is part of the documentation revamp. Once the full set of PRs is
merged, we’ll publish the combined site to staging for review before
updating docs.lancedb.com.

The introductory pages are inconsistent, and the old PR split asked
reviewers to review some pages twice.

This brings the final quickstart, connection guide, architecture and
Concepts pages together. It clarifies OSS and Enterprise, simplifies
naming rules and includes the navigation and diagram fixes from #4489.

Function and Secret details on the Concepts pages are MDX comments until
their release, and CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to write docs before a
release.

Includes #4532. Ingestion, search and integrations are in #4533; data
workflows, SQL and operations are in #4534. Each MDX file has one PR
owner.

Local assembly, Mint validation and link checks pass. The Function pages
stay published from `main` until #4534 hides them, so hold publication
until the complete stack is integrated.
2026-10-15 14:50:47 -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

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