I have these files in my root, Inside pages i have php files for example projects.php, I tried writing in .htaccess rules to take the file for example xxx.com/projects to open the file from /pages/projects.php and it worked with the following

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} . [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f RewriteRule ^ - [L] # No file extension on request then append .php and rewrite to subdir RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.+) RewriteRule !\.[a-z0-4]{2,4}$ /pages/%1.php [NC,L] # All remaining requests simply get rewritten to the subdir RewriteRule (.*) /pages/$1 [L] 

My problem here is when i go to the root xxx.com instead of opening index.php its opening pages directory but if i go explicitely to xxx.com/index.php it works. I dont want index.php to be shown in the url i need to exclude the root from my rule and make it open index.php while the url stays xxx.com

My root directory has the following structure:

/assets/ /pages/ /.htaccess index.pp 

Inside /pages/ I have PHP files. For example,projects.php. I tried writing in .htaccess rules to take the URL example.com/projects and open the file from /pages/projects.php and it worked with the following:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} . [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f RewriteRule ^ - [L] # No file extension on request then append .php and rewrite to subdir RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.+) RewriteRule !\.[a-z0-4]{2,4}$ /pages/%1.php [NC,L] # All remaining requests simply get rewritten to the subdir RewriteRule (.*) /pages/$1 [L] 

My problem here is that when I go to the root example.com, instead of opening index.php it’s opening the /pages/ directory, but if I go explicitly to example.com/index.php it works.

I don’t want index.php to be shown in the URL, so I need to exclude the root from my rule and make it open index.php while the URL stays example.com.