Question

I’m doing some work for a friend on their website, and while we are working on the new site I would like to set up their .htaccess file to redirect users with the following rules:

• Redirect any requests to / or /index.html to a subdirectory (e.g. both http://example.com/ and http://example.com/index.html should redirect to http://example.com/legacy/index.html)
• Allow direct requests to index.php to pass through without redirect (e.g. http://example.com/index.php)
• If possible, requests to a second subdirectory get redirected to index.php (e.g. http://example.com/beta/ redirects to http://example.com/index.php)

This is probably a simple request, but I have no experience with the rules language that .htaccess uses.

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

• Redirect any requests to / or /index.html to a subdirectory (e.g. both http://example.com/ and http://example.com/index.html should redirect to http://example.com/legacy/index.html)

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(index\.html)?$ /legacy/index.html [L]
  

• Allow direct requests to index.php to pass through without redirect (e.g. http://example.com/index.php)

  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
  

• If possible, requests to a second subdirectory get redirected to index.php (e.g. http://example.com/beta/ redirects to http://example.com/index.php)

  RewriteRule ^beta/?$ /index.php [L]
  

These would all go in the htaccess file in your document root. If you actually wanted to redirect the browser so that the URL in the address bar changes, include a R=301 in the square brackets: [L,R=301]. If when you say “requests to a second subdirectory get redirected to index.php” meaning “any subdirectory”, then the rule needs to be changed to:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ /index.php [L]