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 ^(.*)$ $1.html
next remove .html from all your files eg. test.html became just test and also if you wanna open a file from another file then also remove .html from it and just file name
Use a hash tag.
May not be exactly what you want but it solves the problem of removing the extension.
Say you have a html page saved as about.html and you don't want that pesky extension you could use a hash tag and redirect to the correct page.
switch(window.location.hash.substring(1)){
case 'about':
window.location = 'about.html';
break;
}
Routing to yoursite.com#about will take you to yoursite.com/about.html. I used this to make my links cleaner.
To remove the .html extension from your URLs, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :
#mode_rerwrite start here
RewriteEngine On
# does not apply to existing directores, meaning that if the folder exists on server then don't change anything and don't run the rule.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#Check for file in directory with .html extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html !-f
#Here we actually show the page that has .html extension
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [NC,L]
Thanks
For this, you have to rewrite the URL from /page.html to /page
You can easily implement this on any extension like .html .php etc
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.html [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
You will get a URL something like this:
example.com/page.html to example.com/page
Please note both URLs below will be accessible
example.com/page.html and example.com/page
If you don't want to show page.html
Try this
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
More info here
If you have a small static website and HTML files are in the root directory.
Open every HTML file and make the next changes:
Replace href="index.html" with href="/".
Remove .html in all local links. For example: "href="about.html"" should look like "href="about"".
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* https://example.com/html/%1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
it might work because its working in my case
RewriteRule /(.+)(\.html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
Try this :) don't know if it works.
I'm moving a blog from one site to another and repurposing the original site. I want to maintain all existing links that point to the site and hopefully maintain SEO page ranking.
Old URL: http://www.companyabc.com/2010/04/test.html
New URL: http://blog.companyabc.com/2010/04/test.html
The way I'd like to do it is to use a custom 404 error page on www.companyabc.com like this:
<html><meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://blog.companyabc.com/%1"></html>
where %1 is the original URI (/2010/04/test.html), but I don't know if that's possible.
Another option is to use an .htaccess file that redirects if the URL is not found, but I haven't gotten that to work either. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong in the rewrite condition:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-l
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ https://blog.companyabc.com/$1.html [R=301,L]
Any suggestions? Thanks for the help.
I got it working using the following .htaccess configuration:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.companyabc.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I never tried the REQUEST_FILENAME value because I mistakenly thought it only applied to files that can be downloaded from the website. I didn't realize it also applies to the .html files in the blog.
With this solution all URLs that don't exist at www.companyabc.com will be redirected to blog.companyabc.com instead of showing a 404 error page, which is what I'm looking for.
Let's assume that we're are talking about website.com and in the root directory there is a folder called tags.
This directory helps me to have "dynamic urls", for example: website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url or website.com/tags/another-example.
To do this, after an entire day of search :) I discovered that can be made by using .htaccess and at the moment it looks like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?t=$1 [QSA]
In my small point of view it is fantastic, can be funny for someone but after hours and hours of search on stackoverflow.com I finally understand something about the .htaccess file and about RewriteRule.
The problem is: Now, this RewriteRule continues endlessly because instead of just limit to website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url it continues also if I try something like website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url/continue/another-continue/endlessly.
How can I do to stop it? I need that if someone add a slash the page needs to return the 404 error.
So website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url need to work but website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url/ or website.com/tags/my-dinamic-url/something needs to return the 404 error.
The endless redirect can be prevented by checking if the uri starting with /tags. Assume the rewrite rule only apply when the uri is one level deep:
# pass if the uri not starting with /tags/*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/tags/ [NC]
# redirect, ([^/]+) matches any characters, except / character (slash)
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ /tags/$1 [R,QSA,L]
I am currently trying to using .htaccess to do the following:
When b/ is found in the url, it redirects to browse.html. My .htaccess file looks like:
RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteRule ^b/(.*)$ browse.html [NC,L]
I am using Apache version 2.2.31 and here is what my directory looks like:
Root
Root/browse.html
Root/[css]
Root/css/browse.css
Root/[js]
Root/js/browse.js
When I do this, it brings me to browse.html but nothing loads correctly. Every file in the css and js directories become browse.html. Is there something extra I need to add to this?
Here is what the dev tools directory looks like with the .htacess
localhost
b/?page=1 (browse.html file. Name comes from query string)
b/[css]
b/css/browse.css (blank file)
b/[js]
b/js/browse.js (browse.html instead of browse.js)
I have tried putting RewriteBase / in between but that does nothing to the problem.
Your rewrite rule is fine. Problem is happening due to your use of relatives paths for css/js/images. While resolving relative paths browser appends it to current page's path.
You can add this rule above your existing rule::
RewriteEngine On
# fix css/js paths
RewriteRule ^b/.*((?:js|css)/.+)$ /$1 [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^b/(.*)$ browse.html [NC,L]
Make sure to ignore requests if files/folders exists:
RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^b/(.*)$ browse.html [NC,L]
I have a page on my website ( it's html ) which is named "providers.html".
in order to remove the .html part from url, I added this code to .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]
now the problem is that I have a folder which is named "providers" and contains files related to that page.
now when I go to the url, I get a 403 error because browser loads the folder and not the html page.
I really appreciate if any one can give me some guidance to solve this problem.
thanks
This might be what you're looking for:
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\/$
RewriteRule ([^\.]+) $1.html [NC,L]
Turned off directory slashes. This part is the most important part. Basically, if a directory exists, it shouldn't add a slash. This way, we can continue checking rules against exact URI input.
Added a check to see if the the current request does not end with a slash.
If it doesn't, rewrite to the respective HTML file
Otherwise, load up the contents of the directory. You'll more than likely want to have another .htaccess file in there to prevent listings etc., and only allow access to existing files.
Update: Removed ^ and $ from the rule, as I don't believe it is necessary here.