Excluding homepage from Rewrite rules in htaccess

Question

I would like to have this new prerendering service I'm using NOT apply its magic to the homepage and basically only to pages that begin with https://thechartcast.com/episodes/. Below is the relevant section of htaccess that controls the URL rewrites for the service. I am kind of nervous about attempting myself, so if someone could help through how to write such an exception, that would be awesome.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    <IfModule mod_proxy_http.c>
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} googlebot|bingbot|yandex|baiduspider|facebookexternalhit|twitterbot|rogerbot|linkedinbot|embedly|quora\ link\ preview|showyoubot|outbrain|pinterest\/0\.|pinterestbot|slackbot|vkShare|W3C_Validator|whatsapp [NC,OR]
        RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _escaped_fragment_
        RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Prerender} !1
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(?!.*?(\.js|\.css|\.xml|\.less|\.png|\.jpg|\.jpeg|\.gif|\.pdf|\.doc|\.txt|\.ico|\.rss|\.zip|\.mp3|\.rar|\.exe|\.wmv|\.doc|\.avi|\.ppt|\.mpg|\.mpeg|\.tif|\.wav|\.mov|\.psd|\.ai|\.xls|\.mp4|\.m4a|\.swf|\.dat|\.dmg|\.iso|\.flv|\.m4v|\.torrent|\.ttf|\.woff|\.svg))
        RewriteRule ^(index\.html|index\.php)?(.*) http://service.prerender.io/https://thechartcast.com/$2 [P,END]
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Answer 1

You could add another condition to the top of the list of conditions. For example:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/episodes/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ....
:

The RewriteRule that follows will then only be applied when the requested URL starts with /episodes/.

Answer 2

You could change

RewriteRule ^(index\.html|index\.php)?(.*)

to

RewriteRule ^(index\.html|index\.php)?(episodes/.*)

So that it only matches that directory.