Removing The Trailing Slash from a directory in htaccess - .htaccess

Question

The following is my directory structure
Root/
index.php
contact.php
projects.php
/index.php
/project1.php
/project2.php
I have rewrites in place to remove the .php extension from all file names. It works perfectly fine and I can access www.website.com/projects/project2.php from www.website.com/projects/project2
I also want to be able to access www.website.com/projects/index.php as www.website.com/projects
I have managed to write a rule which rewrites the url to www.website.com/projects/ when i type www.website.com/projects
However, I am not being able to get rid of the last trailing slash.
Please note that I do not really understand much of this. Most of it is from what I have found on the internet. I have looked around a lot but not got anything to work till now.
Here is the code:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^projects$ /projects/index.php [L,E=LOOP:1]

Answer 1

This is caused by mod_dir and the DirectorySlash directive. It will automatically 301 redirect requests for a directory that's missing the trailing slash. This fixes an information disclosure security concern (described in the above link) which lists the directory contents even when there's an index file (e.g. index.php). So if you turn this functionality off, be very careful about your directories. If you've got directory indexing turned off, then that's not so much of a concern.
You can turn of directory slashes using:
DirectorySlash Off
You can turn off directory indexing using the Options:
Options -Indexes
And then, you need to have your projects rule before your php extension rule:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews -Indexes
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^projects$ /projects/index.php [L,E=LOOP:1]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

Answer 2

This come in handy if you want to remove trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]
The explanation for this rule is the same as it is for when we want to add a trailing slash, just in reverse. We can also specify specific directories that we don't want apply this rule to.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !directory/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://mydomainname.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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