How can I remove file extension from a website address?

Question

I am designing a website. I want my website address to look like the following image:

I don't want my website to look like http://something.com/profile.php. I want the .php extension to be removed in the address bar when someone opens my website. In other words, I want my website to be like: http://something.com/profile

As a second example, you can look at the Stack Overflow website address itself.

How can I get this done?

Answer 1

Just add an .htaccess file to the root folder of your site (for example, /home/domains/domain.com/htdocs/) with the following content:

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.php -f RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php 

More about how this works in these pages: mod_rewrite guide (introduction, using it), reference documentation

Answer 2

First, verify that the mod_rewrite module is installed. Then, be careful to understand how it works, many people get it backwards.

You don't hide urls or extensions. What you do is create a NEW url that directs to the old one, for example

The URL to put on your web site will be yoursite.com/play?m=asdf

or better yet

yoursite.com/asdf

Even though the directory asdf doesn't exist. Then with mod_rewrite installed you put this in .htaccess. Basically it says, if the requested URL is NOT a file and is NOT a directory, direct it to my script:

RewriteEngine On  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /play.php [L]  

Almost done - now you just have to write some stuff into your PHP script to parse out the new URL. You want to do this so that the OLD ones work too - what you do is maintain a system by which the variable is always exactly the same OR create a database table that correlates the "SEO friendly URL" with the product id. An example might be

/Some-Cool-Video (which equals product ID asdf)

The advantage to this? Search engines will index the keywords "Some Cool Video." asdf? Who's going to search for that?

I can't give you specifics of how to program this, but take the query string, strip off the end

yoursite.com/Some-Cool-Video  

turns into "asdf"

Then set the m variable to this

m=asdf

So both URL's will still go to the same product

yoursite.com/play.php?m=asdf  yoursite.com/Some-Cool-Video  

mod_rewrite can do lots of other important stuff too, Google for it and get it activated on your server (it's probably already installed.)