Removing the index.html from url

Question

Ok, maybe a pretty dumb question but I can't find an answer on Google.

I am coding my site by hand. How do I make the index.html disappear from the url's? Do I use a piece of code in my html? Do I have to change my href's in my files?

Hope you guys can help!

EDIT: I've tried this with a .htaccess file

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

It does work, but all my links aren't working anymore. I discovered I had to remove all the index.html from the href's in my documents. But that would be a lot of work. Is there an other code for .htaccess that just hides index.html?

You could redirect the user if location.href ends with index.html? — ReeCube
– ReeCube, Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 13:36
You can do that with .htaccess and rewrite url. See : stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url — Nuz
– Nuz, Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 13:38
it is called mod rewrite and there is tons of stackoverflow question about it -> stackoverflow.com/search?q=mod+rewrite+index.html — davidkonrad
– davidkonrad, Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 13:38
@davidkonrad good resource, but if the user doesn't know it's called mod rewrite, they would never find these answers :-) — TylerH
– TylerH, Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 13:57

Darko Atanasov · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-29 18:16:52Z

34

A SIMPLE WAY TO DO THIS in Html:

(example in my case is a simple dual language site)

If your link looks like this:

<a href="index.html">Homepage</a>

You should change it to this:

<a href="/">Homepage</a>

If trying to link to another folder in your directory, like is my example:

<a href="en/index.html">English language</a>

You should change it to this:

<a href="en">English language</a>

Notice that "/" goes back to your root directory and automatically selects index.html, so that is why I used "en" for the English language site, because the name of the folder in that case is "en". You should also make sure that you have index.html in your English language folder, and not index-en.html.

answered Jan 29, 2015 at 18:16

Darko Atanasov

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2 Comments

Matt Over a year ago

If I have index.html and page2.html in the root directory, can the homepage link to the other page with <a href="page2">Next</a>? I don't want the url to read /page2.html, but just /page2.

L.U. Over a year ago

This answer worked great for me. Thanks. For above comment on localhost, I don't think it works when you're testing locally. When I was testing in localhost, "/" displayed a list of files and folders contained in the project. But once I published the website, "/" worked just as intended.

vogomatix · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18 13:53:14Z

3

Apache has .htaccess files and mod_rewrite, In your .htaccess file, set:

DirectoryIndex index.html

You can also set this up in the Apache site config files too

You can specify a list of filenames, so if it doesn't find the first it moves to the next.

IIS has .config files

edited Mar 18, 2014 at 13:53

answered Mar 18, 2014 at 13:46

vogomatix

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4 Comments

JGallardo Over a year ago

would be great if you wrote the extra 2 sets of lines as a complete example.

vogomatix Over a year ago

There are no extra lines for the .htaccess file. There are extra lines for the config files, which is why I provided links to them

TheMet4lGod Over a year ago

This doesn't do anything in Apache 2.4.

vogomatix Over a year ago

I wrote this 10 years ago, but it appears the instructions for the latest version of Apache are the same httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_dir.html

murtuza hussain · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-28 07:26:13Z

0

mod_rewrite module is responsible for all the rewriteEngine. Check on your server whether is module is present and enable.

answered Mar 28, 2017 at 7:26

murtuza hussain

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Ashish Yadav · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-22 08:03:25Z

0

You need to create a file called '.htaccess' in the root directory of your site containing the following code:

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

And then make sure all the links on your site don't contain '.html' at the end, e.g.:

<a href="/Home.html">

should be replaced with:

<a href="/Home">

Hope this helps!

if you dont find .htaccess, you just need to create a new file using your text editor the same way you would any other html or css file, but save it as simply '.htaccess'

And save it into the root directory, so the same folder that you have your index.html file.

answered Mar 22, 2019 at 8:03

Ashish Yadav

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1 Comment

TheMet4lGod Over a year ago

This doesn't remove /index.html if you type it into the browser search bar on a local server for testing.

hatef · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-14 09:06:40Z

0

I think this is configured in IIS when you deploy the site, I'm not to sure on it but I'm sure you can specify a start point that your URL will use when you just enter the UL, that implies the Index.html page.

Sorry I'm not too helpful here, hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

Often these things such as Apache or IIS have this set up already, and it looks for the Index.html, Index.php first when you just put your URL in.

edited Apr 14, 2019 at 9:06

hatef

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answered Mar 18, 2014 at 13:39

Joe Harper

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Comments

cnst · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-18 20:45:10Z

Great SEO idea! This is similar to nginx redirect loop, remove index.php from url and Apache .htaccess to hide both .php and .html extentions, as well as mod_rewrite not working htaccess — the idea here, for both Apache's mod_rewrite and nginx ngx_http_rewrite, depends on the differences between the external and internal URLs — in order for the redirect from /index.html to / work, yet not cause redirect loops when actually serving index.html, you gotta make sure you only issue the redirect for external index.html requests, but never for internal ones; this can only be accomplished by looking into the actual request_uri.

Here's the code for nginx ngx_mod_rewrite:

index   index.html  index.txt;
if ($request_uri ~ "^(.*/)index\.(html|txt)$") {    return  301 $1; }

On Apache's mod_rewrite, it'll be something like the following:

RewriteEngine   on
RewriteCond     %{REQUEST_URI}      ^.*/index\.html$
RewriteRule     ^(.*/)index.html$   $1      [R,L]

AlexanderFT · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18 13:38:20Z

-1

Change the link that goes to your homepage to the website address. You may have:

<a href="index.html">Link Here</a>

Change that to:

<a href="http://www.domain.com">Link</a>

Or try this

answered Mar 18, 2014 at 13:38

AlexanderFT

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2 Comments

SpaceApe Over a year ago

I saw this solution earlier. But then I have to publish my site en copy all the url's back to the file... A lot of work... I hoped there was a simple solution.

AlexanderFT Over a year ago

Don't know for shure if the .htacces wil work because you are building page after page. I think you need to change the links. If you use programs like dreamweaver it is easy to change just do control+f and search for you link and fill in the replace by form and it wil replace all the links with that name.

Steve Martin · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18 13:39:06Z

-4

Simply don't type the index.html in your browser and don't advertise it as such.

You can set the 'default document' on the web server (whichever you happen to be using) to serve 'index.html' in the absence of a file part. This way, someone going to http://www.mysite.com would be served http://www.mysite.com/index.html

answered Mar 18, 2014 at 13:39

Steve Martin

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1 Comment

SpaceApe Over a year ago

I know... But when I link to a page from my homepage and I click the link, index.html appears. Simple solution is to use the url in de href. But, that would be a lot of work...

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