Welcome to the comprehensive documentation for Pangolin, the cloud-native Apache Iceberg REST Catalog. Use the categories below to navigate the guides, feature deep-dives, and tool references.
Quickest path from zero to a running lakehouse.
- Onboarding Index - Start Here!
- Installation Guide - Run Pangolin in 5 minutes.
- Evaluating Pangolin - Rapid local testing with
NO_AUTHmode. - Deployment Guide - Local, Docker, and Production setup.
- Environment Variables - Complete system configuration reference.
Managing the foundations: storage and metadata.
- Infrastructure Features - Index of all platform capabilities.
- Warehouse Management - Configuring S3, Azure, and GCS storage.
- Metadata Backends - Memory, Postgres, MongoDB, and SQLite.
- Asset Management - Tables, Views, and CRUD operations.
- Federated Catalogs - Proxying external REST catalogs.
- Known Issues - Documented limitations and active bugs (e.g., SQL backend quirks).
Multi-tenancy, RBAC, and auditing.
- Security Concepts - Identity and Credential Vending principles.
- Credential Vending (IAM Roles) - Scoped cloud access (STS, SAS, Downscoped).
- Permission System - Understanding RBAC and granular grants.
- Service Users - Programmatic access and API key management.
- Audit Logging - Global action tracking and compliance.
Git-for-Data and maintenance workflows.
- Branch Management - Working with isolated data environments.
- Merge Operations - The 3-way merge workflow.
- Merge Conflicts - Theory and resolution strategies.
- Business Metadata & Discovery - Search, tags, and access requests.
- Maintenance Utilities - Snapshot expiration and compaction.
Connecting tools and using our management layers.
- Management UI - Visual guide to the administration portal.
- PyPangolin SDK (Official) - Rich Python client with Git-like operations and types.
- PyIceberg Integration - Native Python client configuration.
- CLI Reference - Documentation for
pangolin-adminandpangolin-user. - API Reference - Iceberg REST and Management API specs.
Deep-dives for developers and contributors.
- Architecture Overview - System design and component interaction.
- Technical Logic Deep-Dive - Caching, Branching (Git-for-Data), and Trait details.
- Data Models - Understanding the internal schema.
- CatalogStore Trait - Extending Pangolin storage.
- Developer Utilities - Tools for contributors (e.g. OpenAPI generation).
Production guides and operational wisdom.
- Best Practices Index - Complete guide to operating Pangolin.
- Deployment & Security - Production checklists.
- Scalability - Tuning for high performance.
- Iceberg Tuning - Optimizing table layout and compaction.
Last Updated: December 2025
Project Status: Alpha