htaccess - rewrite rule not working when requested URL is a folder on my system

Question

All requests to my site should be rewritten to index.php?page=blah, where blah is the page that's requested (except for css, js, jp(e)g, gif and png files).

This is how my .htaccess file looks like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(?:css|js|jpe?g|gif|png)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [L,QSA]

The .htaccess is in this directory: localhost:8080/example/, so when I go to localhost:8080/example/abc, it is (internally) rewritten to localhost:8080/example/index.php?page=abc.

However when I go to localhost:8080/example/res, I get redirected to localhost:8080/example/res/?page=res. I found out that this only happens to directories; when I go to localhost:8080/example/core(also a folder on my file system), I get redirected to localhost:8080/example/core/?page=core while it should be internally rewritten to localhost:8080/example/index.php?page=core and the url visible to the user should stay localhost:8080/example/core/

EDIT:

Thanks to @w3dk, who solved the problem stated above. But I found another problem, which may be related to the problem above:

When I go to: localhost:8080/example/index/a, it's internally rewritten to localhost:8080/example/index.php?page=index.php/a, while it should be rewritten to localhost:8080/example/index.php?page=index/a.

I found out that this happens when index is a file, cause when I go to localhost:8080/example/exampleFile/abc, it's redirected to localhost:8080/example/index.php?page=exampleFile.php/abc, which shouldn't be the case.

The 2 files in my directory are:

• index.php (everything should be directed to this file)
• example.php

Apache seems to ignore the php file extension, cause this also works for exampleFile.txt

Answer 1

This is probably happening because of a conflict with mod_dir. The default behaviour (DirectorySlash On) is for mod_dir to automatically "fix" the URL when you request a physical directory without a trailing slash. It does this with an external 301 redirect, before your rule is processed. Your rule then fires, which modifies the target URL, a Location header gets returned to the client and the browser redirects.

This won't happen if you include the trailing slash on the original request. eg. localhost:8080/example/core/. mod_dir then does not need to "fix" the URL and issue a redirect. Although this may not be desirable for you?

Since you are wanting to internally rewrite all directories then the simple fix is to disable this behaviour in .htaccess:

DirectorySlash Off

You will need to clear your browser cache before testing, as the earlier 301s by mod_dir will have been cached locally.

Reference (note the security warning):
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_dir.html#directoryslash