.htaccess - how to exclude homepage from being redirected?

[TravelSite]

Hi,

I've written some .htaccess code which is designed to redirect requests to just one file/script.

There are a few exemptions to this - e.g. I don't wan't the homepage or the about us page to be redirected.

The code below partially works - most things are redirected, while certain pages including the /contact-us/ avoid being redirected

However I'm having a major problem with the homepage: www.foobar.com/index.php doesn't get redirected (which is what I want) - but www.foobar.com/ does get redirected.

I tried adding in "||" and "|/|" to the last RewriteCond below to cover this - but when I do this nothing at all gets redirected. Is there a way around this?

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.*
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.*.(jpg|jpeg|gif|js|css|class|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(/category/index.php|/index.php|/contact-us/index.php|/contact-us/) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ /category/index.php

[TravelSite]

Sorry - I just realised that I'd missed out the '$' end (which makes it work - doh!)

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(/category/index.php|/index.php|/|/contact-us/index.php|/contact-us/)$ [NC]

[jdMorgan]

Making the redirect rule's pattern require at least one character will fix the "/" home page rewrite problem.

Fixing that, along with several errors (two serious), pattern-anchoring problems, and various redundancies and inefficiencies, yields:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.example\.com)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(jpe?g|gif|js|css|class|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(category/index\.php$|index\.php$|contact-us/) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.+$ /category/index.php [L]

Note that you should add a rule to canonicalize those "/index.php" requests by redirecting them to "www.example.com/", and should always link only to "/" within your own site. Adding this rule as the very first in the list above will take care of the code end, redirecting requests for "/index.php" in any and all directories to "/" in that same directory, but fix your on-site links first before deploying it:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /([^/]*/)*index\.php(\?[^\ ]*)?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]*/)*)index\.php$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Because of the [NC] flag you included on your script-rewrite exclusion RewriteConds, I assume that you receive mis-cased requests for these resources. If that is the case, then those mis-cased requests should be redirected to correctly-cased URLs to avoid duplicate-content issues. Having done so, or if you do not get a lot of mis-cased requests, remove the [NC] flags.

Jim

[TravelSite]

Thanks Jim - that's great.

I want the index.php still to show (for some admin pages I use) - but have added some lines to put "/" at the end of directories - thanks for the suggestion :)

[TravelSite]

I removed the [NC] flag from the two lines - but it still seems to allow urls in the wrong case to work. Any suggestions?

Thanks

[jdMorgan]

Not sure how that's possible, unless you failed to delete your browser cache before testing the new code...

Requests for those mis-cased URLs will no longer be excluded from the second rule, and will therefore get rewritten to "category/index.php".

Jim