How to remove .html from the URL of a static page?
Also, I need to redirect any url with .html to the one without it. (i.e. www.example.com/page.html to www.example.com/page ).
I think some explanation of Jon's answer would be constructive. The following:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
checks that if the specified file or directory respectively doesn't exist, then the rewrite rule proceeds:
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]
But what does that mean? It uses regex (regular expressions). Here is a little something I made earlier...
I think that's correct.
NOTE: When testing your .htaccess do not use 301 redirects. Use 302 until finished testing, as the browser will cache 301s. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/9204355/3217306
Update: I was slightly mistaken, . matches all characters except newlines, so includes whitespace. Also, here is a helpful regex cheat sheet
Sources:
http://community.sitepoint.com/t/what-does-this-mean-rewritecond-request-filename-f-d/2034/2
https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204643270/using-htaccess-rewrite-rules
To remove the .html extension from your urls, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]
NOTE: If you want to remove any other extension, for example to remove the .php extension, just replace the html everywhere with php in the code above.
Also see this How to remove .html and .php from URLs using htaccess` .
This should work for you:
#example.com/page will display the contents of example.com/page.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.html [L,QSA]
#301 from example.com/page.html to example.com/page
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
With .htaccess under apache you can do the redirect like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]
As for removing of .html from the url, simply link to the page without .html
page
You will need to make sure you have Options -MultiViews as well.
None of the above worked for me on a standard cPanel host.
This worked:
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
For those who are using Firebase hosting none of the answers will work on this page. Because you can't use .htaccess in Firebase hosting. You will have to configure the firebase.json file. Just add the line "cleanUrls": true in your file and save it. That's it.
After adding the line firebase.json will look like this :
{
"hosting": {
"public": "public",
"cleanUrls": true,
"ignore": [
"firebase.json",
"**/.*",
"**/node_modules/**"
]
}
}
Thanks for your replies. I have already solved my problem. Suppose I have my pages under http://www.yoursite.com/html, the following .htaccess rules apply.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
</IfModule>
Good question, but it seems to have confused people. The answers are almost equally divided between those who thought Dave (the OP) was saving his HTML pages without the .html extension, and those who thought he was saving them as normal (with .html), but wanting the URL to show up without. While the question could have been worded a little better, I think it’s clear what he meant. If he was saving pages without .html, his two question (‘how to remove .html') and (how to ‘redirect any url with .html’) would be exactly the same question! So that interpretation doesn’t make much sense. Also, his first comment (about avoiding an infinite loop) and his own answer seem to confirm this.
So let’s start by rephrasing the question and breaking down the task. We want to accomplish two things:
Visibly remove the .html if it’s part of the requested URL (e.g. /page.html)
Point the cropped URL (e.g. /page) back to the actual file (/page.html).
There’s nothing difficult about doing either of these things. (We could achieve the second one simply by enabling MultiViews.) The challenge here is doing them both without creating an infinite loop.
Dave’s own answer got the job done, but it’s pretty convoluted and not at all portable. (Sorry Dave.) Łukasz Habrzyk seems to have cleaned up Anmol’s answer, and finally Amit Verma improved on them both. However, none of them explained how their solutions solved the fundamental problem—how to avoid an infinite loop. As I understand it, they work because THE_REQUEST variable holds the original request from the browser. As such, the condition (RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST}) only gets triggered once. Since it doesn’t get triggered upon a rewrite, you avoid the infinite loop scenario. But then you're dealing with the full HTTP request—GET, HTTP and all—which partly explains some of the uglier regex examples on this page.
I’m going to offer one more approach, which I think is easier to understand. I hope this helps future readers understand the code they’re using, rather than just copying and pasting code they barely understand and hoping for the best.
RewriteEngine on
# Remove .html (or htm) from visible URL (permanent redirect)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.+)\.html?$ [nocase]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [L,R=301]
# Quietly point back to the HTML file (temporary/undefined redirect):
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [END]
Let’s break it down…
The first rule is pretty simple. The condition matches any URL ending in .html (or .htm) and redirects to the URL without the filename extension. It's a permanent redirect to indicate that the cropped URL is the canonical one.
The second rule is simple too. The first condition will only pass if the requested filename is not a valid directory (!-d). The second will only pass if the filename refers to a valid file (-f) with the .html extension added. If both conditions pass, the rewrite rule simply adds ‘.html’ to the filename. And then the magic happens… [END]. Yep, that’s all it takes to prevent an infinite loop. The Apache RewriteRule Flags documentation explains it:
Using the [END] flag terminates not only the current round of rewrite
processing (like [L]) but also prevents any subsequent rewrite
processing from occurring in per-directory (htaccess) context.
Resorting to using .htaccess to rewrite the URLs for static HTML is generally not only unnecessary, but also bad for you website's performance. Enabling .htaccess is also an unnecessary security vulnerability - turning it off eliminates a significant number of potential issues. The same rules for each .htaccess file can instead go in a <Directory> section for that directory, and it will be more performant if you then set AllowOverride None because it won't need to check each directory for a .htaccess file, and more secure because an attacker can't change the vhost config without root access.
If you don't need .htaccess in a VPS environment, you can disable it entirely and get better performance from your web server.
All you need to do is move your individual files from a structure like this:
index.html
about.html
products.html
terms.html
To a structure like this:
index.html
about/index.html
products/index.html
terms/index.html
Your web server will then render the appropriate pages - if you load /about/, it will treat that as /about/index.html.
This won't rewrite the URL if anyone visits the old one, though, so it would need redirects to be in place if it was retroactively applied to an existing site.
I use this .htacess for removing .html extantion from my url site, please verify this is correct code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{http://www.proofers.co.uk/new} !(\.[^./]+)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_fileNAME} !-f
RewriteRule (.*) /$1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+)\.html\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.html$ http://www.proofers.co.uk/new/$1 [R=301,L]
Making my own contribution to this question by improving the answer from #amit-verma (https://stackoverflow.com/a/34726322/2837434) :
In my case I had an issue where RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f was triggering (believing the file existed) even when I was not expecting it :
%{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html was giving me /var/www/example.com/page.html for all these cases :
www.example.com/page (expected)
www.example.com/page/ (also quite expected)
www.example.com/page/subpage (not expected)
So the file it was trying to load (believing if was /var/www/example.com/page.html) were :
www.example.com/page => /var/www/example/page.html (ok)
www.example.com/page/ => /var/www/example/page/.html (not ok)
www.example.com/page/subpage => /var/www/example/page/subpage.html (not ok)
Only the first one is actually pointing to an existing file, other requests were giving me 500 errors as it kept believing the file existed and appending .html repeatedly.
The solution for me was to replace RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f with RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f
Here is my entire .htaccess (I also added a rule to redirect the user from /index to /) :
# Redirect "/page.html" to "/page" (only if "/pages.html" exists)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /(.+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.html$ /$1 [NC,R=301,L]
# redirect "/index" to "/"
RewriteRule ^index$ / [NC,R=301,L]
# Load "/page.html" when requesting "/page" (only if "/pages.html" exists)
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ /%{REQUEST_URI}.html [QSA,L]
Here is a result example to help you understand all the cases :
Considering I have only 2 html files on my server (index.html & page.html)
www.example.com/index.html => redirects to www.example.com
www.example.com/index => redirects to www.example.com
www.example.com => renders /var/www/example.com/index.html
www.example.com/page.html => redirects to www.example.com/page
www.example.com/page => renders /var/www/example.com/page.html
www.example.com/page/subpage => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/index.html/ => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/page.html/ => returns 404 not found
www.example.com/test.html => returns 404 not found
No more 500 errors 🚀
Also, just to help you debug your redirections, consider disabling the network cache in your browser (as old 301 redirections my be in cache, wich may cause some headaches 😅):
first create a .htaccess file and set contents to -
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
next remove .html from all your files eg. test.html became just test and also if you wanna open a file from another file then also remove .html from it and just file name
Use a hash tag.
May not be exactly what you want but it solves the problem of removing the extension.
Say you have a html page saved as about.html and you don't want that pesky extension you could use a hash tag and redirect to the correct page.
switch(window.location.hash.substring(1)){
case 'about':
window.location = 'about.html';
break;
}
Routing to yoursite.com#about will take you to yoursite.com/about.html. I used this to make my links cleaner.
To remove the .html extension from your URLs, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :
#mode_rerwrite start here
RewriteEngine On
# does not apply to existing directores, meaning that if the folder exists on server then don't change anything and don't run the rule.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#Check for file in directory with .html extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html !-f
#Here we actually show the page that has .html extension
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [NC,L]
Thanks
For this, you have to rewrite the URL from /page.html to /page
You can easily implement this on any extension like .html .php etc
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
You will get a URL something like this:
example.com/page.html to example.com/page
Please note both URLs below will be accessible
example.com/page.html and example.com/page
If you don't want to show page.html
Try this
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
More info here
If you have a small static website and HTML files are in the root directory.
Open every HTML file and make the next changes:
Replace href="index.html" with href="/".
Remove .html in all local links. For example: "href="about.html"" should look like "href="about"".
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* https://example.com/html/%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
it might work because its working in my case
RewriteRule /(.+)(\.html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
Try this :) don't know if it works.
I am trying to change the url that is displayed in the address bar from mysite.com/blog/wedding-hair/ to mysite.com/services/wedding-hair/ using .htaccess.
Using answers from:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8713319/assigning-different-name-to-existing-folder-in-url-in-htaccess
rewrite a folder name using .htaccess
Replace directory name in url with another name
I added to the .htaccess file. Here is the .htaccess file, I added the last rewrite rule:
Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/www\.mysite\.com" [R=301]
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ /services/$1 [L]
the non-www redirect works but not the blog-services rewrite. I thought maybe I had the directory names reversed but changing them around doesn't work either. I have tried adding and removing /'s around the directory names in all of the different combinations. I tried adding
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /blog/
before my RewriteRule. Nothing I Have tried has worked, the displayed url remains mysite.com/blog/wedding-hair/
I am sure this is pretty straight forward for someone but I am unable to get this correct. Any help would be appreciated.
When I was working on this yesterday I didn't think about the fact that the blog directory is a WordPress install. Here is the .htaccess file that is in the blog directory:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
I have tried adding my RewriteRule in this file but still no joy.
The problem here is that RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ /services/$1 [L] internally rewrites the URI, so that the browser doesn't know it's happening, this happens entirely on the server's end. If you want the browser to actually load a different URL, you need to use the R flag like you are in your www redirect, though it's only redirecting requests to root. If you want it to redirect everything to include the "www", you want something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Then to redirect "blog" to "services", just add the R flag (or R=301 if you want the redirect to be permanent).
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*)$ /services/$1 [L,R]
And, if for whatever reason your content isn't actually at /blog/, you need to internally rewrite it back
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /services/
RewriteRule ^services/(.*)$ /blog/$1 [L]
But this is only if your content is really at /blog/ but you only want to make it appear that it's at /services/.
Actually, in such case, as you have a specific field in Wordpress options to handle the display of a different url, it CAN'T work with .htaccess is the WordPress rules are executed at the end.
And it would be much simpler to use the field "Site Address (URL)" in the General Settings, and enter "mysite.com/services/"
If you don't do that, in spite of your .htaccess, the WP internal rewriting will use you installation repertory
I have a website running at localhost/pm and the RewriteBase is correctly set to /pm/. There is a link tag in my document: <link ... href="themes/default/css/default.css">.
When the url is localhost/pm or localhost/pm/foo the CSS works all right. When there are more slashes in the URL, however, like localhost/pm/foo/bar the relative URL if the stylesheet changes to foo/themes/default/css/default.css.
How do I get this to work without having to put some sort of PHP path resolution in the link tag?
# invoke rewrite engine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /pm/
# Protect application and system files from being viewed
RewriteRule ^(?:system)\b.* index.php/$0 [L]
# Allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Rewrite all other URLs to index.php/URL
RewriteRule .* index.php/$0 [PT]
EDIT:
Basically what I need now is this:
If request contains folder name /themes/ scrap everything that is before /themes/ and rewrite the rest to /pm/themes/...
I tried it like this: RewriteRule ^.*(/themes/.*)$ /pm/themes/$1 but I get an internal server error. Why?
If I do it like this: RewriteRule ^.*(/themes/.*)$ /pm/themes/ (ie. just remove $1 from the end) and use the URL http://localhost/pm/foo/themes/foo/ the resulting physical location is http://localhost/pm/themes which is what is expected too, which in turn means that at least my regex is correct. What am I missing?
The RewriteRule is almost correct
RewriteRule ^.*(/themes/.*)$ /pm/themes/$1
This rewrites http://localhost/pm/foo/themes/default/css/default.css to http://localhost/pm/themes/themes/default/css/default.css, which is one themes too much. Use this instead
RewriteRule /themes/(.*)$ /pm/themes/$1 [L]
But now you have an endless rewrite loop, because /pm/themes/.. is rewritten again and again. To prevent this, you need a RewriteCond excluding /pm/themes
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/pm/themes/
RewriteRule /themes/(.*)$ /pm/themes/$1 [L]
Now the request is rewritten only once and you're done.
You probably need to add the following lines before your RewriteRule:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
It will only evaluate your rewrite rule if the requested file or directory doesn't exist.
You should post your .htaccess file so we can offer better advice
I have no experience with .htaccess, but I got a tip that it's very useful so I wanted to try this.
I now have a file called .htaccess, in my root folder.
The files contains this;
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kellyvuijst\.nl [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.kellyvuijst.nl/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule (.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
What I'm trying to do here is create a 'www.mysite.com/portfolio/' instead of 'mysite.com/portfolio.html' I used some tutorials on this and I think it's correct, but I'm not sure.
So now I have this file, and what now? The tutorials all show what to put in the file but not what to do with it? Do I need to call for it in every .html page I have? And how do I call for it?
A .htaccess file is automatically invoked by the server.
You have just to put this into your file :
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule www.mysite.com/portfolio/ /mysite.com/portfolio.html [L]
Hmm, you're using a lot of rules here to achieve just that.
Anyway, no you don't have to include that file. If you're hosting your site on a server with Apache it'll be included automatically. Can you also run PHP files or is your site just HTML? That's always an easy sign if you're also using Apache (not 100%, but often the go together).
If so, you could try just using these rules first:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.(.+)\.(.+)$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%1.%2/$1 [R=301,L]
If that always adds www to your address, even if you type in the URL without www at least you can be certain that it works.
Then, to make the .html disappear you can add this rule:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule $(.*)/$ /$1.html [L]
This should make every url that ends with a slash (like portfolio/) use a .html file instead (portfolio.html), but only if /portfolio/ isn't an actual directory on your website.
(I removed your url from the rules because this way it should also work if you use it on another website, or if you change your url. It should still do what you want)
Made sure the server is configured to allow htaccess files to override host options. So in your vhost/server config, you need:
AllowOverride All