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+date = 2021-10-10
+title = "Apache Redirect HTML Files to a Directory"
+description = "Learn how to conveniently rewrite certain Apache web file URLs to directories with the Apache web server."
+draft = false
++++
+
+## The Problem
+
+After recently switching static site generators (SSG), my blog URLs changed with
+no option to preserve the classic `.html` extension at the end of my blog 
+post URLs.
+
+I really disliked using my old SSG ([Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com)) and prefer
+my new tool ([Zola](https://www.getzola.org)) much more, so I was determined to
+figure out a way to get the proper redirect set up so that people who find my
+posts online aren't constantly met by 404 errors.
+
+## The Solution
+
+To solve this problem, I really needed to solve two pieces:
+
+1. Redirect all blog post URL requests from `/blog/some-post.html` to
+   `/blog/some-post/`.
+2. Ensure that no other `.html` files are redirected, such as `index.html`.
+
+After _a lot_ of tweaking and testing, I believe I have finally found the
+solution. The solution is shown below.
+
+```config
+RewriteEngine On
+RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\index.html$ [NC]
+RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
+```
+
+This piece of code in the Apache `.conf` or `.htaccess` file will do the
+following:
+
+1. Turn on the RewriteEngine so that we can modify URLs.
+2. Ignore any `index.html` files from the rule we are about to specify.
+3. Find any `.html` files within the website directory and redirect it to
+   exclude the file extension.
+4. The final piece is adding the trailing slash (`/`) at the end of the URL -
+   you'll notice that I don't have an Apache rule for that since Apache handles
+   that automatically.