htaccess Silent Redirect to Subdirectory: Subdirectory showing when no trailing '/'

Question

I have dug high and low around Google and StackOverflow to try and figure out my problem, trying countless solutions but nothing has completely worked.

I\'m looking to m

Answer 1

Jon Lin's answer was very helpful in determining what was causing the problem in my very similar setup. For completeness I will include the relevant information from his answer:

This is probably happening because mod_dir (the module that automatically redirects the browser if a request for a directory is missing a trailing slash to the same thing with a trailing slash. See the DirectorySlash directive in mod_dir

What's happening is:

1. You request: mydomain.com/Contact
2. mod_dir doesn't touch this since /Contact isn't a directory
3. /Contact gets rewritten to /subdir/Contact and internally redirected
4. mod_dir sees that /subdir/Contact is a directory and missing the trailing slash so it redirects the browser to mydomain.com/subdir/Contact/
5. So now, your browser's location bar has the /subdir/ in it.

In my case, I had requests being redirected to /subdir with a few exceptions and didn't want to have to re-enable DirectorySlash for each of those exceptions.

By allowing RewriteEngine to continue after the initial redirect to /subdir, it's possible to mimic what mod_dir would be doing while also taking /subdir into account, before mod_dir gets to see it.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/exception1|exception2|...
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir/$1

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^subdir/(.*) $1/ [R,L]

Note: You may need to be careful about allowing RewriteEngine to continue if there are further rules. Not matching the second rule will continue on to any further rules which may produce a different result.

This can be avoided by using a third rule to stop RewriteEngine processing if the redirect into /subdir has happened:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^subdir
RewriteRule .* - [L]