.htaccess, proper rewriting of directory and file with same name

Question

As of now my website has a few static pages, one of which is /portfolio. Among other things, my htaccess hides the .html extension. I'd like to add a portfolio directory, but I do not want to move my existing portfolio page into the portfolio directory as the default index file. My /portfolio page is one of my Google sitelinks and I am afraid if it is moved or if the url changes in someway, Google will consider it to be a brand new page.

My problem is once I add the /portfolio/ directory, whenever I try to visit the original /portfolio page, a trailing slash is automatically added and it links to the directory itself.

I've tried countless options, one being a rewrite of /portfolio/ to /portfolio, however this creates an infinite loop. I also tried "DirectorySlash Off" but that only removed the trailing slash while being inside the directory, it didn't revert access to the original /portfolio page.

Ultimately, I would like to keep my /portfolio page as-is, linking to pages inside the directory like so /portfolio/example and if either /portfolio or /portfolio/ is accessed it will result in showing the same page which is outside of the directory without Google thinking it is duplicate content.

A similar question exists here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1237531/htaccess-rewriting-url-to-page-or-directory though this still resulted in an infinite loop for me for some reason, I'm guess it has something to do with the hidden extensions.

Here's my htaccess-

RewriteEngine On

# HTML to PHP
RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html

# Hide extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

# Force WWW
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.net
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.net/$1 [R=301,L]

# Blog Subdomain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mydomain.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.net/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

I know it's not a great idea having a directory with the same name as a static page, but I really would rather not alter the existing page and lose the Google sitelink, so a clean and proper way to handle this would be a help.

Answer 1

There are two things going "wrong" here, and two ways to fix it.

The first is that apache "figures out" that there is a directory by the name of "portfolio" before the rewrite conditions are applied. That means that the rewrite conditions are receiving "portfolio/" instead of "portfolio".

Second, the "!-d" rule is specifically avoiding the rewrite that you want to make if there is in fact a directory by that name

Solution 1: Manually re-route requests for the portfolio directory to remove the slash.

# Manually re-route portfolio/ requests to portfolio
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} portfolio/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 

# Hide extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

Note the removal of the "!-d" condition.

The downside to this is that you are having to hard-code the "portfolio" edge case directly into the rewrite rules, and will still result in the browser being first redirected to portfolio/

Solution 2: Set DirectorySlash Off and remove directory exists test

# Disable Automatic Directory detection
DirectorySlash Off

# Hide extension
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

Setting DirectorySlash Off would fix this issue the best, but may break other parts of your site where you actually want the auto DirectorySlash. Best of Luck, and I hope this helps.

Note when testing solution 2, your browser may remember the redirect of "portfolio" to "portfolio/" and perform the redirect before it even sends the request to the server. Be sure to test in a cache-clear, clean environment for best results.