Question

On a website I work on, there is a directory with files like this:

abc.com/parts/df/df001/df001.html

There are about 800 in the sequence of df numbers. I’d like to be able to use a link like this:

abc.com/parts/df/df001/

I know you can use defaultIndex to set the default page to something other than index.html, but can you do this for a specific directory, such that for all sub directories of /parts/df map to an HTML file with the same name as the subfolder?

Or, better yet, I’d like to use a URL like this:

abc.com/parts/df001 (even though the file lives at abc.com/parts/df/df001/df001.html)

I think this might be possible with mod_rewrite and regular expressions, but I can’t figure it out.

Answer 1

look at the Apache HTTPD documentation – the directive you’re looking for is called DirectoryIndex. The contexts you can define that are given with server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess – but at the same time you learn (from the documentation) that there’s no type of regex supported for that directive. Therefore mod_rewrite is what you need.

Regarding the regex – I’d say you can use sth like this:

RewriteRule ^parts/df/df(\d+)/$ parts/df/df$1/df$1.html [L,R=301]

To be placed either in a .htaccess within parts/df (or any upper folder) or within the vhost configuration. For details on that see the documentation.