Removing the index.html from url - html

Question

Ok, maybe a pretty dumb question but I can't find an answer on Google.
I am coding my site by hand. How do I make the index.html disappear from the url's? Do I use a piece of code in my html? Do I have to change my href's in my files?
Hope you guys can help!
EDIT:
I've tried this with a .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index\.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
It does work, but all my links aren't working anymore. I discovered I had to remove all the index.html from the href's in my documents. But that would be a lot of work. Is there an other code for .htaccess that just hides index.html?

Answer 1

A SIMPLE WAY TO DO THIS in Html:
(example in my case is a simple dual language site)
If your link looks like this:
Homepage
You should change it to this:
Homepage
If trying to link to another folder in your directory, like is my example:
English language
You should change it to this:
English language
Notice that "/" goes back to your root directory and automatically selects index.html, so that is why I used "en" for the English language site, because the name of the folder in that case is "en". You should also make sure that you have index.html in your English language folder, and not index-en.html.

Answer 2

Apache has .htaccess files and mod_rewrite,
In your .htaccess file, set:
DirectoryIndex index.html
You can also set this up in the Apache site config files too
You can specify a list of filenames, so if it doesn't find the first it moves to the next.
IIS has .config files

Answer 3

mod_rewrite module is responsible for all the rewriteEngine. Check on your server whether is module is present and enable.

Answer 4

You need to create a file called '.htaccess' in the root directory of your site containing the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
And then make sure all the links on your site don't contain '.html' at the end, e.g.:
<a href="/Home.html">
should be replaced with:
<a href="/Home">
Hope this helps!
if you dont find .htaccess, you just need to create a new file using your text editor the same way you would any other html or css file, but save it as simply '.htaccess'
And save it into the root directory, so the same folder that you have your index.html file.

Answer 5

I think this is configured in IIS when you deploy the site, I'm not to sure on it but I'm sure you can specify a start point that your URL will use when you just enter the UL, that implies the Index.html page.
Sorry I'm not too helpful here, hopefully it will point you in the right direction.
Often these things such as Apache or IIS have this set up already, and it looks for the Index.html, Index.php first when you just put your URL in.

Answer 6

Great SEO idea! This is similar to nginx redirect loop, remove index.php from url and Apache .htaccess to hide both .php and .html extentions, as well as mod_rewrite not working htaccess — the idea here, for both Apache's mod_rewrite and nginx ngx_http_rewrite, depends on the differences between the external and internal URLs — in order for the redirect from /index.html to / work, yet not cause redirect loops when actually serving index.html, you gotta make sure you only issue the redirect for external index.html requests, but never for internal ones; this can only be accomplished by looking into the actual request_uri.
Here's the code for nginx ngx_mod_rewrite:
index index.html index.txt;
if ($request_uri ~ "^(.*/)index\.(html|txt)$") { return 301 $1; }
On Apache's mod_rewrite, it'll be something like the following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/index\.html$
RewriteRule ^(.*/)index.html$ $1 [R,L]
Related:
nginx redirect loop, remove index.php from url
Apache .htaccess to hide both .php and .html extentions
mod_rewrite not working htaccess
References:
http://nginx.org/r/index
http://nginx.org/r/if
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteCond

Answer 7

Change the link that goes to your homepage to the website address.
You may have:
Link Here
Change that to:
Link
Or try this

Answer 8

Simply don't type the index.html in your browser and don't advertise it as such.
You can set the 'default document' on the web server (whichever you happen to be using) to serve 'index.html' in the absence of a file part. This way, someone going to http://www.mysite.com would be served http://www.mysite.com/index.html