Access pages without the php extension using .htaccess

• 1 min read
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Heads up! This post was written in 2012, so it may contain information that is no longer accurate. I keep posts like this around for historical purposes and to prevent link rot, so please keep this in mind as you're reading.

— Cory

There are a number of ways to make "clean URLs" work on your site, but this one is pretty straight forward.  It allows you to access /any-page.php by simply going to /any-page.  Just place the following into your .htaccess file (and make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT\_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(\[^.\]+)$ $1.php \[NC,L\]

The nice thing about this is that it doesn't affect querystrings.  With this solution, both of these URLs are effectively the same:

http://example.com/page.php?id=123

http://example.com/page?id=123

Of course, the caveat is that you don't have "clean querystrings", but it's a reasonable trade-off between "clean" and configuration.

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