Create index entry pointing to external URL?

[Carl Gay]

Hi. My project, opendylan.org, has a reference manual that was created using a different, non-Sphinx, process. It's plain HTML, essentially.  I would like for the items in the reference manual to appear in the Sphinx-generated index and in search results.

Is there a way to use the index:: directive to create an index entry that  links to an arbitrary URL rather than to "here"?  I didn't see support for it in the Sphinx docs.

The next best thing I can think of is to create a new document that consists entirely of entries like this, one for each item in the language reference:

.. index:: single: shallow-copy

`shallow-copy <https://opendylan.org/books/drm/Coercing_and_Copying_Objects#shallow-copy>`_

I think that would get shallow-copy into the index and search results, but it's not ideal because of the extra click-through to get to the actual doc for shallow-copy.

Ideas?  Thanks.

-Carl