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've set a .htaccess with a set of rules.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|stylesheets|javascript|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^Canvas/(.*)/(.*)$ /canvas.php?a=$1&b=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
The above rule get redirected and throwing 500 internal server error.
When I comment the last line, everything that follows the rule /canvas/something/something is working fine but things are going wrong when un-comment the last line.
I tried adding condition like
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/canvas.php.*
and
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^/canvas.php.*
but it didn't resolved the problem.
How could I resolve this?
[L] does not do what you think it does: It only stops "this round" and restarts the rewriting execution with the new URL. You might want to try [END].
See End vs Last flags.
Alternatively, you cant try using the skip flag [S=number_of_rules_to_skip].
You could perhaps try adding an environment variable to mark the fact you've redirected and trap for this using a RewriteCond. For example (untested):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|stylesheets|javascript|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^Canvas/(.*)/(.*)$ /canvas.php?a=$1&b=$2 [E=REWRITEDONE:1,L]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REWRITEDONE} !1
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Two things are happening here. First, /canvas.php is getting rewritten to /index.php/canvas.php. Then /index.php itself is getting rewritten to /index.php/index.php/canvas.php, and then that keeps looping. Your second rule has no conditions to prevent it from blindly rewriting everything that matches ^(.*)$ (which is everything). Note that RewriteCond's only affect the immediately following RewriteRule, so the one that routes to /index.php won't have any conditions on it. A few conditions that you can add to prevent the looping:
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|canvas\.php|images|stylesheets|javascript|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Rewrites everything that isn't index.php, canvas.php, images, stylesheets, scripts, and the robots.txt file. Or:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
Rewrites everything that isn't pointing to an existing file or directory. This also excludes direct access to stuff like scripts and styles and the robots.txt, along with any other static content.
Another possibility is to prevent looping entirely, by adding this to the top of your rules (right below RewriteEngine On:
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} 200
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
This means if there's already an internal rewrite, stop rewriting completely by passing through the URI (the - target). The rewrite engine loops until the URI going in stops changing, the passthrough essentially does that. If you are using apache 2.4, you can also use the END rewrite flag to stop rewriting.
I'm having some issues setting up single page redirects using htaccess. Currently I have a htaccess file with:
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?path=$1 [QSA,L]
Then a set of redirects e.g.
Redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.mydomain.com/new-page
But the problem I am having is that when I go into a browser and type in the old URL, I get redirected to URL with a parameter attached, e.g:
"http://www.mydomain.com/new-page?path=oldpage.htm"
For some of my redirects this seems to work anyway, for some it produces a 404 error. I've also tried using RewriteCond and Rewrite Rule to write more generic catch all redirects for those pages that I can, and I'm having the same issue.
I'm thinking that some other rule must be interfering with my redirects - the only one I can see which might do so is the rule above, but if that was the case shouldn't the URL I am redirected to end up being
"http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?path=oldpage.htm"
Can anyone explain why parameters are being appended to the URLs and how I can stop this happening so that my redirects work?
Cheers!
This is because mod_alias (the Redirect directive) and mod_rewrite (the Rewrite* directives) are both being applied to the same URI in the URL-file mapping processing pipeline. In order to keep this from happening, you need to stick with one or the other in this case.
You also want the redirect to get applied first:
RewriteRule ^/?oldpage.htm$ http://www.mydomain.com/new-page [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?path=$1 [QSA,L]
Your index.php rule is going to catch all requests that aren't CGI scripts that are symlinks, so, pretty much everything if that's really your intention. Otherwise you can let legit requests get by unscathed by including:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
Above the last rule.
because your $1 in rewrite rule
RewriteRule (.*) index.php [QSA,L] try this
This is my current .htaccess file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ index.php?p1=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ index.php?p1=$1&p2=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ index.php?p1=$1&p2=$2&p3=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ index.php?p1=$1&p2=$2&p3=$3&p4=$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ index.php?p1=$1&p2=$2&p3=$3&p4=$4&p5=$5 [L]
Basically, it takes up to five "Friendly url folders" and assign the value to varibles and then, send those to my index.php page
IE: http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/
$p1 = 'ford';
$p2 = 'focus';
$p3 = 'grey';
$p3 = 'grey';
So far, so good.
Now, I need to integrate a 301 instruction (RegExp?) in that same .htaccess because initially, I had GET parameters like this :
IE: http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/?lang=fr
I need to get rid of all GET variables because Google sees it as duplicate content (even if I'm using the nofollow attribute on my languages links)
IE: http://i.want.to.keep/my/url/?AND_DUMP_GET_VARIABLES
http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/?lang=fr
http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/?lang=en
http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/?lang=sp
==> http://www.example.com/ford/focus/grey/
Logically, the instruction should be interpreted between the first and the second block but I just don't know where to start. Any hints?
THANKS!
As I understand you want to get rid of the QUERY STRING and redirect (301 Permanent Redirect) to the same URL but without QUERY STRING.
The rule below will redirect EVERY request that has query string:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^$
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1? [R=301,L]
1. The ? will do the magic -- will strip query string
2. You desperately need this line: RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$. The problem is that it may not work on your Apache setup and I cannot give you what exactly you need to make it work (it works fine on my vanilla Apache v2.2.17 on Windows).
After rewrite (internal redirect) occurred, it goes to next iteration and Apache starts matching all rules from the top again but for already rewritten URL. If we not add the above line, then mod_rewrite will apply the above rule to rewritten URL form and you will end up with all URLs get rewritten to /index.php with no parameters at all.
If the above will not work, then try the code below:
# do not do anything for already existing files and folders
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule .+ - [L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1? [R=301,L]
With help of # do not do anything for already existing files and folders rule, mod_rewrite will stop rewriting after URL will be rewritten to /index.php?p1=... format.
In case the above will not work at all (better -- in addition to the above -- I would suggest adding this anyway) use <link rel="canonical" href="FULL_PROPER_RUL"/> in your page:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
I'm having some trouble with my .htaccess redirections.
I want a situation in which the (non-www)domain.tld is redirected to the www.domain.tld. And I want to rewrite the arguments to skip the index.php, making a request for /foo go to index.php/foo.
Initial situation
First I had these rules
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.tld [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.tld/$1 [R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\ /:-]*)$ index.php [L]
And this worked. Mostly. What didn't work was that in PHP $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] stayed empty and I disliked the whitelisting of the characters.
Change for PATH_INFO and to accept more
So I changed the last line into this:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
This fixed the PATH_INFO and the limited characters. However, I recently noticed that this caused the non-www redirect to www. to fail miserably.. When going to the non-www domain Apache says
Moved Permanently
The document has moved here.
Where 'here' is linked to the same thing I typed (non-www domain.tld) and thus failing to serve the user.
Continuing the search..
I found a lot of Q&A here and elsewhere or the topic of non-www redirections, but all seem to fail in some way. For example:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/.+www\/(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301]
This just didn't do that much. Nothing got redirected, although the website was served on the non-www.
Anyone knowing what I do wrong or having a solution for this mess? :)
(Preferably, I would like the non-www redirection to be global. So that I don't have to change the actual domain name every time.)
I guess you’re just missing the L flag to end the rewriting process:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
And make sure to put this rule in front of those rules that just cause an internal rewrite.