Adding a cross-reference to a subheading or anchor in another page

Question

How to insert a cross-reference in a reST/Sphinx page to either a sub-header or anchor in another page in the same documentation set?

Answer 1

The expression "reST/Sphinx" makes the scope of the question unclear. Is it about reStructuredText in general and Sphinx, or only about reStructuredText as used in Sphinx (and not reStructuredText in general)? I'm going to cover both since people using RST are likely to run into both cases at some point:

Sphinx

Besides the domain-specific directives that can be used to link to various entities like classes (:class:) there's the general :ref: directive, documented here. They give this example:

    .. _my-reference-label:

    Section to cross-reference
    --------------------------

    This is the text of the section.

    It refers to the section itself, see :ref:`my-reference-label`.

Although the general hyperlinking mechanism offered by RST does work in Sphinx, the documentation recommends against using it when using Sphinx:

Using ref is advised over standard reStructuredText links to sections (like Section title_) because it works across files, when section headings are changed, and for all builders that support cross-references.

RST, in General

The tools that convert RST files to HTML do not necessarily have a notion of collection. This is the case for instance if you rely on github to convert RST files to HTML or if you use a command line tool like rst2html. Unfortunately, the various methods to use to get the desired result vary depending on which tool you are using. For instance, if you use rst2html and you want file A.rst to link to a section named "Section" in file other.rst and you want the final HTML to work in a browser, then A.rst would contain:

`This <other.html#section>`__ is a reference to a section in another
file, which works with ``rst2html``. Unfortunately, it does not work
when the HTML is generated through github.

You have to link to the final HTML file and you have to know what the id given to the section will be. If you want to do the same for a file served through github:

`This <other.rst#section>`__ is a reference to a section in another
file, which works on github. Unfortunately, it does not work when you
use ``rst2html``.

Here too you need to know the id given to the section. However, you link to the RST file because it is only upon accessing the RST file that the HTML is created. (At the time of writing this answer, accessing the HTML directly is not allowed.)

A complete example is available here.

Answer 2

New, better answer for 2016!

The autosection extension lets you do this easily.

=============
Some Document
=============


Internal Headline
=================

then, later...

===============
Some Other Doc
===============


A link-  :ref:`Internal Headline`

This extension is built-in, so all you need is to edit conf.py

extensions = [
    .
    . other
    . extensions
    . already
    . listed
    .
    'sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel',
]

The only thing you have to be careful of is that now you can't duplicate internal headlines across the doc collection. (Worth it.)

Answer 3

Example:

Hey, read the :ref:`Installation:Homebrew` section.

where Homebrew is a section inside a different document named Installation.rst.

This uses the autosection feature, so will need to edit config.py with the following:

extensions = [
    'sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel'
]
autosectionlabel_prefix_document = True

Answer 4

In Sphinx 3.0.3 the only solution that worked for me is :any: (see https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.5/markup/inline.html#cross-referencing-anything). Suppose, one document has such a section:

.. _my-section:

My Section
----------

Lorem ipsum blablabla

Then another document can have the following fragment to create a link:

See :any:`my-section` for the details