Question

Please excuse me as I’m pretty new to using .htaccess, and am having a few issues with it as the setup I need is, despite being simple, seemingly rare.

Basically, I’m working on a secondary domain trying to hide .php extensions from pages, but whilst also redirecting requests for nonexistent pages to a custom search page. The overall desired effect is:

realpage => realpage.php

and

falsepage => search.php?q=falsepage

So far, the code I have (see below) seems to apply the latter correctly, but rather than returning ‘realpage.php’ for ‘domain.com/realpage’ it returns a 404 error.

I’ve found variations which also move realpage to ‘search.php?q=missing’ in case that gives any indication what might be going wrong!

My .htaccess file at the moment:

   Options +FollowSymLinks
   Options +Indexes

   RewriteEngine On

   RewriteBase /

   RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [L]

   RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ search.php?q=$1 [L]

---

Thanks for any help you can offer! It’s very much appreciated!

Answer 1

I think for your first rule, you want something along the lines of:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.php [L]

I ran that through the rewrite rule tester, and it will direct ‘realpage’ to ‘realpage.php’. If that doesn’t work, I would suggest disabling your second rule, making sure the first one works well, then adding the check for missing files in later.