How can I remove file extension from a website address?

Question

I am designing a website. I want my website address to look like the following image:

I don't want my website to look like http://something.example/profile.php. I want the .php extension to be removed in the address bar when someone opens my website. In other words, I want my website to be like: http://something.example/profile

As a second example, you can look at the Stack Overflow website address itself.

How can I get this done?

Answer 1

Just add an .htaccess file to the root folder of your site (for example, /home/domains/domain.example/htdocs/) with the following content:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

More about how this works in these pages: mod_rewrite guide (introduction, using it), reference documentation

Answer 2

First, verify that the mod_rewrite module is installed. Then, be careful to understand how it works, many people get it backwards.

You don't hide URLs or extensions. What you do is create a NEW URL that directs to the old one, for example

The URL to put on your web site will be yoursite.example/play?m=asdf

or better yet

yoursite.example/asdf

Even though the directory asdf doesn't exist. Then with mod_rewrite installed you put this in .htaccess. Basically it says, if the requested URL is NOT a file and is NOT a directory, direct it to my script:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /play.php [L]

Almost done - now you just have to write some stuff into your PHP script to parse out the new URL. You want to do this so that the OLD ones work too - what you do is maintain a system by which the variable is always exactly the same OR create a database table that correlates the "SEO friendly URL" with the product id. An example might be

/Some-Cool-Video (which equals product ID asdf)

The advantage to this? Search engines will index the keywords "Some Cool Video." asdf? Who's going to search for that?

I can't give you specifics of how to program this, but take the query string, strip off the end

yoursite.example/Some-Cool-Video

turns into "asdf"

Then set the m variable to m=asdf.

So both URLs will still go to the same product

yoursite.example/play.php?m=asdf
yoursite.example/Some-Cool-Video

mod_rewrite can do lots of other important stuff too, Google for it and get it activated on your server (it's probably already installed.)

Answer 3

You have different choices. One on them is creating a folder named "profile" and rename your "profile.php" to "default.php" and put it into "profile" folder. and you can give orders to this page in this way:

• Old page: http://something.example/profile.php?id=a&abc=1
• New page: http://something.example/profile/?id=a&abc=1

If you are not satisfied leave a comment for complicated methods.

Answer 4

Here is a simple PHP way that I use.
If a page is requested with the .php extension then a new request is made without the .php extension. The .php extension is then no longer shown in the browser's address field.

I came up with this solution because none of the many .htaccess suggestions worked for me and it was quicker to implement this in PHP than trying to find out why the .htaccess did not work on my server.

Put this at the beginning of each PHP file (preferrably before anything else):

include_once('scripts.php');  
strip_php_extension();  

Then put these functions in the file 'scripts.php':

//==== Strip .php extension from requested URI  
function strip_php_extension()  
{  
  $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];  
  $ext = substr(strrchr($uri, '.'), 1);  
  if ($ext == 'php')  
  {  
    $url = substr($uri, 0, strrpos($uri, '.'));  
    redirect($url);  
  }  
}  

//==== Redirect. Try PHP header redirect, then Java, then http redirect
function redirect($url)  
{  
  if (!headers_sent())  
  {  
    /* If headers not yet sent => do php redirect */  
    header('Location: '.$url);  
    exit;  
  }  
  else  
  {
    /* If headers already sent => do javaScript redirect */  
    echo '<script type="text/javascript">';  
    echo 'window.location.href="'.$url.'";';  
    echo '</script>';  

    /* If javaScript is disabled => do html redirect */  
    echo '<noscript>';  
    echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url='.$url.'" />';  
    echo '</noscript>';  
    exit;  
  }  
}  

Obviously you still need to have setup Apache to redirect any request without extension to the file with the extension. The above solution simply checks if the requested URI has an extension, if it does it requests the URI without the extension. Then Apache does the redirect to the file with the extension, but only the requested URI (without the extension) is shown in the browser's address field. The advantage is that all your "href" links in your code can still have the full filename, i.e. including the .php extension.

Answer 5

The problem with creating a directory and keeping index.php in it is that

1. your links with menu will stop functioning
2. There will be way too many directories. For eg, there will be a seperate directory for each and every question here on stackoverflow

The solutions are 1. MOD REWRITE (as suggested above) 2. use a php code to dynamically include other files in index file. Read a bit more abt it here http://inobscuro.com/tutorials/read/16/

Answer 6

Actually, the simplest way to manipulate this is to

1. Open a new folder on your server, e.g. "Data"
2. Put index.php (or index.html) in it

And then the URL www.yoursite.example/data will read that index.php file. If you want to take it further, open a subfolder (e.g. "List") in it, put another index.php in that folder and you can have www.yoursite.example/data/list run that PHP file.

This way you can have full control over this, very useful for SEO.

Answer 7

same as Igor but should work without line 2:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

Answer 8

Remove a file extension through .htaccess:

Original URL: http://ravinderrathore.herobo.com/contact.php

.htaccess rule to remove .php, .html, etc. file extensions from URLs:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

After Rewriting: http://ravinderrathore.herobo.com/contact

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(.+)\.php([#?][^\ ]*)?\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^index(.*)?$ index.php$1 [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^login_success(/)?$ login_success.php [L,QSA]

RewriteRule ^contact(/)?$ contact.php [L,QSA]

Answer 9

Tony, your script is ok, but if you have 100 files? Need add this code in all these :

include_once('scripts.php');
strip_php_extension();

I think you include a menu in each php file (probably your menu is showed in all your web pages), so you can add these 2 lines of code only in your menu file. This work for me :D

Answer 10

just nearly the same with the first answer about, but some more advantage.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php

Just add up if you have a other file-extension in your sites

Answer 11

For those who are still looking for a simple answer to this; You can remove your file extension by using .htaccessbut this solution is just saving the day maybe even not. Because when user copies the URL from address bar or tries to reload or even coming back from history, your standart Apache Router will not be able to realize what are you looking for and throw you a 404 Error. You need a dedicated Router for this purpose to make your app understand what does the URL actually means by saying something Server and File System has no idea about.

I leave here my solution for this. This is tested and used many times for my clients and for my projects too. It supports multi language and language detection too. Read Readme file is recommended. It also provides you a good structure to have a tidy project with differenciated language files (you can even have different designs for each language) and separated css,js and phpfiles even more like images or whatever you have.

Cr8Router - Simple PHP Router