Apache - remove .php and .html file extensions using mod_rewrite in httpd.conf

Heya,

Your current rules have a few issues which are probably causing them to not work as expected.

1. Your regular expression includes a trailing slash (/$), which means it only matches URLs that end with a slash. This may not be what you want.

2. The %{REQUEST_FILENAME} variable contains the full filesystem path to the file or script matching the request. You are appending .php and .html to this variable, but then you are comparing it to the root directory because of the leading slash.

Here’s how you can rewrite your rules:

<Directory /var/www/>
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine On

        # For PHP files
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L]

        # For HTML files
        RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html [L]
    </IfModule>

    <IfModule mod_expires.c>
        ...
        <IfModule mod_headers.c>
            ...
        </IfModule>
    </IfModule>
</Directory>

Note:

• The [L] flag causes mod_rewrite to stop processing the rule set, which is useful for handling multiple rewrite conditions.

• ^(.*)$ will match any character except newline, which should cover all URLs.

• %{REQUEST_FILENAME} is replaced with $1, which in this context is the actual requested URL.

After making these changes, make sure to restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Please ensure your server allows .htaccess overrides or the <Directory> directive in the server configuration for these mod_rewrite rules to take effect.

Also, these rules will enable extensionless URLs, but they do not enforce them, meaning that the URL with the .php or .html extension will still be accessible. If you want to enforce extensionless URLs (i.e., redirect .php or .html URLs to extensionless ones), you’ll need additional rules.