how do I hide file extension in PHP?

Question

I tried many commands like the following

RewriteRule ^(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)$ $1.php?$2=$3 [L]

in .htaccess to hide the php extension from the URL but do not work, I have the following site.org/home.php and I want it to site.org/home, how can I do this? Is it possible to do it without modifying .htaccess file as well?

I tried this as well in the .htaccess file and doesn't work

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine  on
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php
</IfModule>

Does this answer your question... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4026021/remove-php-extension-with-htaccess — MrWhite, Oct 15 '21 at 10:09
Does this answer your question? [Remove .php extension with .htaccess](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4026021/remove-php-extension-with-htaccess) — RiggsFolly, Oct 18 '21 at 12:59

MrWhite · Answer 1 · 2021-10-18T14:53:26.577

You don't actually "hide" the extension using .htaccess (if that is what you are expecting). You must first remove the .php extension in your HTML source, in your internal links (Apache/.htaccess should not be used to do this). The extension is now "hidden" (but the links don't work).

You then use .htaccess to internally rewrite the extensionless URL back to the .php extension in order to make the URL "work".

For example:

RewriteEngine On

# Rewrite to append ".php" extension if the file exists
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1.php -f
RewriteRule (.+) $1.php [L]

Given a request for /home, the above will internally rewrite the request to /home.php if home.php exists as a physical file in the document root.

Note that this rule does assume your URLs do not end in a slash. eg. It expects /home and not /home/. if you request /home/ then it will result in a 404, since /home/.php does not exist.

The preceding condition first checks that the requested URL + .php exists as a physical file before rewriting the request. This is necessary in order to prevent a rewrite loop (500 error).

If your URLs do not contain dots (that are otherwise used to delimit the file extension) then the above can be optimised by excluding dots in the matched URL-path. ie. Change the RewriteRule pattern from (.+) to ^([^.]+)$. This avoids your static resources (.css, .js, .jpg, etc.) being unnecessarily checked for the corresponding .php file.

If you are changing an existing URL structure that previously used the .php extension and these URLs have been indexed by search engines and/or linked to by third parties then you should also redirect requests that include .php in order to preserve SEO. This redirect should go before the above rewrite, immediately after the RewriteEngine directive:

# Redirect to remove ".php" extension
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule (.+)\.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

The preceding condition that checks against the REDIRCT_STATUS environment variable ensures that only direct requests are stripped of the .php extension and not rewritten requests by the later rewrite (which would otherwise result in a redirect loop).

NB: Test with a 302 (temporary) redirect first to avoid potential caching issues.

RewriteRule ^(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)$ $1.php?$2=$3 [L]

This does considerably more than simply "removing" (or rather "appending") the .php extension.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine  on
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php
</IfModule>

This will result in a rewrite-loop, ie. a 500 Internal Server Error response as it will repeatedly append the .php extension again and again to the same request.

(The <IfModule> wrapper is not required.)

how do I remove the .php extension in my source code? do I save index.php as an index text file? — , Oct 18 '21 at 20:45
@Ahmet the same way you created the links in the first place, but remove the `.php` part. (?!) — MrWhite, Oct 18 '21 at 20:53

how do I hide file extension in PHP?

1 Answers1