Removing index.php from URL even after .htaccess updates?

Question

I am a little afraid to post this, but I'm running into an issue and haven't found a solution yet. I've been able to successfully remove the "index.php" from all my URLs, however I'm still finding that if I manually add "index.php" to any URL, I can still view the page and am not redirected to a URL without "index.php". For example:

http://domain.com/events/

Works just fine, but if I visit http://domain.com/index.php/events/ I can still view the page. Any idea on how to force it to redirect me to just http://domain.com/events/?

Here's my .htaccess file for reference:

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Remove index.php from URLs
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On

  # Force trailing slash
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^(.*[^/])$ /$1/ [L,R=301]

  # Force www
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =domain.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

  # Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule (.+) index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

Is this even possible with Craft? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There's nothing unique or special for doing this with Craft CMS - you should be able to use this method for just about any web app running in a LAMP stack. See this post on removing index.php from the URL with Apache/mod_rewrite/.htaccess.

TLDR: add this bit to the end of your .htaccess file before the closing tag.

If Craft's index.php is at the domain root, such as example.com/index.php, this should do it:

# Redirect to same url without index.php
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET./index\.php(/.*)?$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php/admin\b [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php(/(.*))?$ /$2 [R=302,NE,L]

If it lives in a subfolder, do this instead:

# Redirect to same url without index.php
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET./subfolder/index\.php(/.*)?$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subfolder/index\.php/admin\b [NC]
RewriteRule ^subfolder/index\.php(/(.*))?$ /$2 [R=302,NE,L]

(In both examples, replace admin on the 2nd line with whatever your site’s CP trigger is set to, if you’ve changed it.)

Answer 2

After playing around, I found a solution. I hope this helps anyone in the future:

# ------------------------------------------------------------
# Remove index.php
# ------------------------------------------------------------
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,NE,L]

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.+) /index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]

Thanks, Nick for taking the time to help! It got me going in the right direction.