Rewriting .htaccess to remove sub-directory from URL

Question

I want to mask a folder in URL, so instead of www.mysite.com /employers/university-of-worcester/profile.html there would be www.mysite.com /university-of-worcester/profile.html , meaning that sub-directory "employers" is hidden.

There will be many folders created inside "employers" folder.

This is a matter of modifying .htaccess, I have tried a lot of solutions that I have found on stack.

The latest line of code I tried to add is:

RewriteRule ^employers/(.*)$ /$1 [L]

My .htaccess looks like this now:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteRule ^employers/(.*)$ /$1 [L]
</IfModule>

If I go to URL www.mysite.com/employers/ this will redirect to www.mysite.com/ (the homepage), which I am happy about, but if I try www.mysite.com/university-of-worcester/profile.html I get "The page can't be found.", but the home profile.html is definitly inside "university-of-worcester" folder.

I am using wordpress.

Answer 1

This probably is what you are looking for:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^/employers/?(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,QSA]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/employers/
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /employers/$1 [END,QSA]

This will redirect direct requests to that folder and internally rewrite requests to that folder.

It is a good idea to start out with a 302 temporary redirection and only change that to a 301 permanent redirection later, once you are certain everything is correctly set up. That prevents caching issues while trying things out...

In case you receive an internal server error (http status 500) using the rule above then chances are that you operate a very old version of the apache http server. You will see a definite hint to an unsupported [END] flag in your http servers error log file in that case. You can either try to upgrade or use the older [L] flag, it probably will work the same in this situation, though that depends a bit on your setup.

This rule will work likewise in the http servers host configuration or inside a dynamic configuration file (".htaccess" file). Obviously the rewriting module needs to be loaded inside the http server and enabled in the http host. In case you use a dynamic configuration file you need to take care that it's interpretation is enabled at all in the host configuration and that it is located in the host's DOCUMENT_ROOT folder.

And a general remark: you should always prefer to place such rules in the http servers host configuration instead of using dynamic configuration files (".htaccess"). Those dynamic configuration files add complexity, are often a cause of unexpected behavior, hard to debug and they really slow down the http server. They are only provided as a last option for situations where you do not have access to the real http servers host configuration (read: really cheap service providers) or for applications insisting on writing their own rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).