How to remove .html from URL?

Question

I think some explanation of Jon's answer would be constructive. The following:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

checks that if the specified file or directory respectively doesn't exist, then the rewrite rule proceeds:

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]

But what does that mean? It uses regex (regular expressions). Here is a little something I made earlier...

I think that's correct.

NOTE: When testing your .htaccess do not use 301 redirects. Use 302 until finished testing, as the browser will cache 301s. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/9204355/3217306

Update: I was slightly mistaken, . matches all characters except newlines, so includes whitespace. Also, here is a helpful regex cheat sheet

Sources:

http://community.sitepoint.com/t/what-does-this-mean-rewritecond-request-filename-f-d/2034/2

https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204643270/using-htaccess-rewrite-rules

To remove the .html extension from your urls, you can use the following code in root/htaccess :

RewriteEngine on


RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,L,R]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^ %{REQUEST_URI}.html [NC,L]

NOTE: If you want to remove any other extension, for example to remove the .php extension, just replace the html everywhere with php in the code above.

Also see this How to remove .html and .php from URLs using htaccess` .

This should work for you:

#example.com/page will display the contents of example.com/page.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.html [L,QSA]

#301 from example.com/page.html to example.com/page
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

With .htaccess under apache you can do the redirect like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301] 

As for removing of .html from the url, simply link to the page without .html

<a href="http://www.example.com/page">page</a>

You will need to make sure you have Options -MultiViews as well.

None of the above worked for me on a standard cPanel host.

This worked:

Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

For those who are using Firebase hosting none of the answers will work on this page. Because you can't use .htaccess in Firebase hosting. You will have to configure the firebase.json file. Just add the line "cleanUrls": true in your file and save it. That's it.

After adding the line firebase.json will look like this :

{
  "hosting": {
    "public": "public",
    "cleanUrls": true, 
    "ignore": [
      "firebase.json",
      "**/.*",
      "**/node_modules/**"
    ]
  }
}

Thanks for your replies. I have already solved my problem. Suppose I have my pages under http://www.yoursite.com/html, the following .htaccess rules apply.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/
   RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]

   RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/
   RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]
</IfModule>