How to remove /index.html

Question

How to make redirect /index.html -> / in Apache?

Redirect /index.html http://domain-name.com/

Is causeing infinite loop when opening home page.

Answer 1

It is most likely causing an infinite loop as they are the same. The default pages in Apache are index.html and index.htm.

If the browser does not request a file name the web server will return one of those files if it finds them. So When you go to http://domain-name.com you are actually viewing http://domain-name.com/index.html just without /index.html

Answer 2

Just do it the other way round, instead of redirecting to the domain example.com, tell the server which page to display when a user requests the domain directly.

In the .htaccess file you can write (this is the default anyway):

DirectoryIndex index.html

Now if somebody requests http://example.com the server will actually send back the index.html file, but the browser still displays http://example.com. If somebody requests http://example.com/index.html there is no reason not to deliver this page, as long as you do not link to this URL somewhere, nobody will ever request it in this form.

Answer 3

From an SEO perspective, if example.com/ and example.com/index.html are the same, use canonical links to address it.