How do you create a home page without a file name or .HTML extension?

Question

When we make HTML pages, we generally save it with a .htm or .html extension. But most webpages on the internet have extensions like .com or .org, for example, https://example.com. How do these pages work?

Answer 1

There are several ways to achieve this:

1. Create an index.html inside root folder of your hosting and open your domain ie. http://example.com, you can see the output from index.html on http://example.com

2. You can tell your server using .htaccess to display the desired file when someone opens your domain.

Answer 2

Create your index.html file. You will see when you publish that it will say 'example.com/page.html'. To remove the .html you need to create a .htaccess file in your root folder. Within that .htaccess file paste this code:

#Removes file extentions from URL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

This also removes .php file extensions.

It's good to know that if you want HTTPS instead of HTTP, you also use the same .htaccess file for this.