.htaccess: redirect specific link to another?

I have these three links:

localhost/my_projects/my_website.php
localhost/my_projects/my_website.html
localhost/my_projects/my_website


The paths of the php and html files are as follows:

C:xampphtdocsmy_projectsmy_website.php
C:xampphtdocsmy_projectsmy_website.html


The link without an extension is "artificial" and I want to use said link:

localhost/my_projects/my_website


to get the contents of either of these links:

localhost/my_projects/my_website.php
localhost/my_projects/my_website.html


The reason for the two example files, instead of just one, is that I want to be able to switch between those two files when I edit the htaccess file. Obviously I only want to access one of those files at a time.

What do I need to have in my .htaccess file inside the my_projects folder to accomplish that? How can I make one specific link redirect to another specific link?

1 Answer
1

After reading your comment clarifying your folder structure I corrected the RewriteRule. (By the way, it would be best if you add that info to the question itself instead of in comments).

The url you want to target is: http://localhost/my_projects/my_website

http://localhost/my_projects/my_website

http:// is the protocol
localhost is your domain (it could also be 127.0.0.1 or a domian name like www.example.com in the Internet)

http://

localhost

www.example.com

I assume you are running Apache on port 80, otherwise in the url you need to also specify the port. For port 8086 for example it would be http://localhost:8086/my_projects/my_website.

80

8086

http://localhost:8086/my_projects/my_website

The real path is htdocs/my_projects/my_website.php or htdocs/my_projects/my_website.html depending on your needs (obviously both won't work at the same time).

htdocs/my_projects/my_website.php

htdocs/my_projects/my_website.html

Here the my_projects in the "fake" url collides with the real folder "my_projects" so Apache will go for the folder and see there is no my_website (with no extension) document there (it won't reach the rewrite rules).

my_projects

"my_projects"

There is a question in SO that provides a work around for this, but it is not a perfect solution, it has edge cases where the url will still fail or make other urls fail. I had posted it yesterday, but I seem not to find it now.

The simple solution if you have the flexibility for doing it is to change the "fake" url for it not to collide with the real path.

One option is for example to replace the underscores with hyphens.
Then you would access the page as http://localhost/my-projects/my-website if you want to keep a sort of "fake" folder structure in the url. Otherwise you could simply use http://localhost/my-website.

http://localhost/my-projects/my-website

http://localhost/my-website

Here are both alternatives:

# This is for the directory not to be shown. You can remove it if you don't mind that happening.
Options -Indexes

RewriteEngine On

#Rule for http://localhost/my-projects/my-website
RewriteRule ^my-projects/my-website(.+)?$ my_projects/my_website.php$1 [NC,L]

#Rule for http://localhost/my-website
RewriteRule ^my-website(.+)?$ my_projects/my_website.php$1 [NC,L]


(Don't use both, just choose one of these two, or use them to adapt it to your needs)

The first part the rewrite rule is the regular expression for your "fake" url, the second part is the relative path of your real folder structure upto the page you want to show.

In the regular expression we capture whatever what we assume to be possible query parameters after .../my_website, and paste it after my_website.php in the second part of the rule (the $1).

.../my_website

my_website.php

$1

Later on if you want to point the url to my_website.html, you have to change the second part of the rule, where it says .php, replace it by .html.

my_website.html

.php

.html

By the way, it is perfectly valid and you'll see it in most SEO friendly web sites to write an url as http://www.somesite.com/some-page-locator, and have a rewrite rule that translates that url to a page on the website, which is what I had written in my first answer.

SEO

http://www.somesite.com/some-page-locator

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