.htaccess for /index.html = /

Question

I would like Google, Twitter and Google+ to treat

http://example.com http://example.com/ and http://example.com/index.html as one and the same URL.

Redirect 301 http://example.com http://example.com/ works
Redirect 301 http://example.com/index.html http://example.com/ does nothing (two different urls are still seen)
Redirect 301 /index.html / results in a redirect loop

I'd be most grateful to anyone who might be able to give me the definitive way to write that has redirect.

Answer 1

You can use this code in your DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex index.html
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*?)index\.html$ /$1 [L,R=302,NC,NE]

Also note that http://example.com/ and http://example.com are same URL for a web server and browser. Browsers usually strip trailing slash even before sending request to web server thus making http://example.com/ to http://example.com