How to remove subdirectory and index.php from URL with htaccess?

Question

I've got an apache website stored on the server at /var/www/website/ and it's the only one on that server. I'd like to adjust the URL accordingly. How can I make an .htaccess rule that would do this?

before: https://example.com/website/index.php
after: https://example.com/

Answer 1

There's not a lot of information here. For instance, what do you want to happen with all your other URLs (do you have any other URLs)? For the sake of this answer I assume you just have a single URL, / that needs to rewrite to /website/index.php (as stated in your question).

Anyway, you don't do this entirely in .htaccess. The first thing you must do is:

1. Change the URL in your application. Change your links to point to https://example.com/ (not https://example.com/website/index.php)

2. You can then use mod_rewrite in .htaccess to internally rewrite the URL from https://example.com/ to https://example.com/website/index.php (the underlying filesystem path):

   RewriteEngine On
   
   # Rewrite "/" to "/website/index.php"
   RewriteRule ^$ /website/index.php [L]
   

3. Optionally, if you are changing an existing URL structure and you need to preserve SEO then you can also implement an external redirect from /website/index.php to /. However, you must only do this if you have implemented step #1 above. This goes before the above rewrite:

   # Redirect "/website/index.php" to "/"
   RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
   RewriteRule ^website/index\.php$ / [R=302,L]
   

   The RewriteCond (condition) is necessarily to prevent a redirect loop. To prevent the rewritten URL (above) being redirected.

   (Change to a 301 only after you have tested that this works OK - to avoid caching issues whilst testing.)

In Summary:

RewriteEngine On

# Redirect "/website/index.php" to "/"
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^website/index\.php$ / [R=302,L]

# Rewrite "/" to "/website/index.php"
RewriteRule ^$ /website/index.php [L]