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+date = 2021-10-09
+title = "Apache Redirect HTML Files to a Directory"
+description = ""
+draft = false
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+
+# 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.
+
+``` conf
+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.