Clean URLS www. to non, remove index.php, remove .php extention, add trailing slash using HTACCESS

Question

So it seems I can find solutions for some of these but can't get them to all work together. What I am trying to do is create clean URLS from all sides.

1. resolve all www. and non-www. to the non www. page
2. remove all occurrences of index.php (ie if navigating to folder /blog/index.php resolve as /blog/)
3. remove php extension from all URLS (ie /page.php to /page/)
4. add trailing slash (ie /page to /page/)

This is what I have so far:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule .*[^/]$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1.php [L]

This accomplishes the clean URL's removing the .php extension and adding the trailing slash. I had to take out the www.to non and removal of index.php because the clean urls and trailing slashes stopped working. Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

Here's what your .htaccess should look like:

RewriteEngine On

# Remove www.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

# Remove file extensions, add a trailing slash.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/$ $1.php
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /$1/$2.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule (.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

This is a really good reference article about removing file extensions fro URLs. Just remember, for this to work, you must reference the non-extension version in all of your links eg <a href="about">About</a> , not <a href="about.php">About</a>

While you're doing .htaccess things, I might also recommend adding in the following snippets. The first two are concerned with website speed, the second is for a custom 404 page, and the third is for forcing UTF-8 (so you don't have to declare it in your HTML).

# Expires caching (Caching static files for longer drastically improves performance, you might even want to put even more aggressive times)
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>

# Gzip 
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>

# 404 Page
ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

# Force UTF-8
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

I wrote about this in a blog post on CodePen, if you're interested.

HTML BP has an insane 700+ line .htaccess that you can see for some cool tricks.