After hours of searching unable to find the answer anywhere I finally figured it out!
I needed to 301 redirect files or pages like:
http://www.domain.com/directory/directory2/pagename
to
http://www.domain.com/directory/directory2/pagename.php (or .htm etc.)
Since most of files already had the .htm extension, mod-rewrite was looping itself making the redirect impossible. I only had about 100 pages that didn’t have the .htm extension so I need to add a line of code to check to see if the file name already exists before the Rewrite Rule.
How I finally got it to work was like this
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.htm -f
RewriteRule ^app/category/(.*)$ /app/category/$1.htm [R=301,L]
- “RewriteEngine on“ instructs mod_rewrite to start checking URLS.
- The next line: “RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d” instructs mod_rewrite to not do the redirect if the request is for an actual directory on the server. For example if your website hosts a blog in a sub directory called “blog” (http://www.domain.com/blog) you wouldn’t want /blog to redirect to /blog.htm
- “RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.htm -f” – tells mod-rewrite to not run the redirect on files that already exist on the server. For example you would want to redirect file.htm to file.htm.htm – this will cause a endless circle that will never end and prevent your pages from ever loading (the first mistake I made)
- The next line “RewriteRule ^app/category/(.*)$ /app/category/$1.htm [R=301,L]” I’ve broken down below.
- The “^” tells mod-rewrite to include everything before “app”.
- The (.*) is a variable that matches any and all characters after the final “/” in my URL. The $ is how you end the command line.
- The next portion “/app/category/$1.htm” tells mod-rewrite the URL to redirect to.
- the “1$” is the variable used to tell mod-rewrite you are referring to the “(.*)” in the previous line.
- [R=301,L] – means Redirect=301 permanent redirect and “L” means “last rewrite to run”
Hope this helps!
