I have my URL address like this www.example.com/subfolder/index1 and I want to achieve the following result www.example.com/index1 (see below I only have 2 subfolders, I have to do the same for both).

The folder that I have in my project are the following:

index.html (main page)
subfolder1 -> index1.html
subfolder2 -> index2.html

I have the following code in my htaccess file so far:

index.html
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.] )\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]

CodePudding user response：

By having two "hidden" subdirectories (/subfolder1 and /subfolder2) you've created an ambiguity. eg. Where should a request for /foo be rewritten to? Should it be /subfolder1/foo.html or /subfolder2/foo.html? The only way to determine this is to first check if the file exists in /subfolder1, otherwise rewrite to /subfolder2.

You also appear to be using .html extensionless URLs. And you appear to be referencing files outside of these two subfolders.

Try something like the following:

DirectoryIndex index.html

RewriteEngine On

# Redirect any direct requests for "/subfolder1" or "/subfolder2" back to the root
# - Except for "assets"
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/[^/] /assets/
RewriteRule ^(?:subfolder1|subfolder2)(?:$|/(.*)) /$1 [R=301,L]

# Remove "index.html" entirely if requested
RewriteRule (^|. /)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

# Remove ".html" extension if requested directly
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^([^.] )\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

# Rewrite requests to subfolder1 if ".html" file exists in that subdir
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/subfolder1/$1.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^.] )$ subfolder1/$1.html [L]

# Rewrite requests to subfolder2 if ".html" file exists in that subdir
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/subfolder2/$1.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^.] )$ subfolder2/$1.html [L]

# Otherwise append ".html" if the file exists
# - Only required if you are serving other HTML files outside of the subfolders 
# - (Excluding "/index.html" in the document root)
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^.] )$ $1.html [L]

A few assumptions:

• your static resources (images, CSS, JS, etc) are requested directly and include /subfolder1 or /subfolder2 in the URL. Otherwise it becomes problematic to resolve all ambiguities between /subfolder1 and /subfolder2. However, this does mean the /subfolder1 (or /subfolder2) is not truly "hidden".
• Your extensionless URLs do not contain a dot (which otherwise delimits the file extension).

NB: Test with 302 (temporary) redirects to avoid potential caching issues.