Question

I want my urls to be extensionless, so no .php extension, I also want there not to be an opportunity to access the URL with a trailing slash.

The following removes php extension and thens redirects to the extensionless url if you try to access it with .php

I started writing a rule to stop you accessing with a / and redirect, but it does not work, any help?

#this removes php extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L] 

# stops you accessing url with.php
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /([^.?\ ]+)\.php
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.php(/.+)?$ /$1%{PATH_INFO} [R=301]

# stops you accessing url with / **DOESNT WORK**
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$  /$1 [R=301,L]

Answer 1

You’re looking at things backwards: the first rule you have doesn’t “remove the php extension”, it adds it to URLs that don’t already have it (technically, any that don’t contain a period).

I think you want something more like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Remove .php from any URLs that contain it, using an external 301 redirect
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^no-redirect-loop(&|$)
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$  $1  [NS,R=301,L]

# Now add it back internally
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^no-redirect-loop(&|$)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  $1.php?no-redirect-loop  [NS,QSA]

Edit: While debugging another similar answer, I realized that the previous solution I posted here wasn’t going to work in an .htaccess file. I’ve edited the example code above to use a rather ugly kluge for breaking redirect loops instead. A side effect of the kluge is that all scripts will see an extra empty URL parameter named no-redirect-loop.