Support remote external links in Sphinx notebooks

[dlvilla]

Context

I am creating a large documentation project using jupyter notebooks as examples. For my reStructuredText files, I can include a file that contains all of my external links and then make references to those links. I use rst_prolog but I can also just include the file

.. include:: external_links.rst

This pypi_ link in external_links.rst works!

When I do this in a jupyter notebook using {eval-rst} it does not work. I am not using {include} because the documentation says not to and it does not work either. The only external link that works is one that is explicitly defined in the external link itself. I also tried MarkDown reference links and an {include} and it did not work.

I have attached a minimal example showing what I want in full.

min_example.zip

Proposal

I am requesting that external links to web URL's be able to be defined external to a jupyter notebook in a Sphinx project and somehow included in a MarkDown cell. If there is a way to do this, then my request is moot and I'm all ears to learn how.

Tasks and updates

No response