Apache: How can I both redirect foo.html to foo an

Question

I'm hosting a website that's just a bunch of static .html files. I don't want to have the .html file extension in the URLs, so I've added a rewrite rule:

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
  RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /$1.html [L]

This is simple enough and works fine, but I would now also like to redirect (302) URLs ending in .html to the canonical path, i.e. without the file extension. I've tried the following:

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

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
  RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /$1.html [L]

However, that leads to an endless redirect loop. I suspect that's because the second rule, the internal rewrite, is still triggering the first rule, the external redirect.

How else can I achieve this? I've looked through all the rewrite flags and tried a bunch that sounded promising, but I haven't managed to make this work. How can I both rewrite from foo.html to foo and still do an internal rewrite from foo to foo.html?

Answer 1

There are several questions asking about how this procedure works. Use THE_REQUEST variable:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /(.+)\.html
RewriteRule \.html$ /%1 [R=302]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /$1.html [L]