sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel – Allow referencing sections by their title

Added in version 1.4.

By default, cross-references to sections use labels (see ref). This extension allows you to instead refer to sections by their title.

For example:

A Plain Title
-------------

This is the text of the section.

It refers to the section title, see :ref:`A Plain Title`.

Internally, this extension generates the labels for each section. If same section names are used in whole of document, any one is used for a target by default. The autosectionlabel_prefix_document configuration variable can be used to make headings which appear multiple times but in different documents unique.

Configuration

autosectionlabel_prefix_document
Type:
bool
Default:
False

True to prefix each section label with the name of the document it is in, followed by a colon. For example, index:Introduction for a section called Introduction that appears in document index.rst. Useful for avoiding ambiguity when the same section heading appears in different documents.

autosectionlabel_maxdepth
Type:
int | None
Default:
None

If set, autosectionlabel chooses the sections for labeling by its depth. For example, when set 1 to autosectionlabel_maxdepth, labels are generated only for top level sections, and deeper sections are not labeled. It defaults to None (i.e. all sections are labeled).

Debugging

The WARNING: undefined label indicates that your reference in ref is mis-spelled. Invoking sphinx-build with -vvv (see -v) will print all section names and the labels that have been generated for them. This output can help finding the right reference label.