How to hide the .html extension with Apache mod_rewrite

I have a small number of static sites where I simply want to hide the .html extension:

• the url /foo fetches the static file /foo.html
• the browser still displays the url /foo

The client can then send out bookmarks in the style mydomain.com/foo rather than mydomain.com/foo.html.

It sounds very simple, and I've used mod_rewrite happily before (say with WordPress or for redirects), but this is proving much harder to crack that I thought. Perhaps I'm missing something really obvious, but I can't find a solution anywhere and I've been at it all day!

We run our own server, so this can go wherever is the best place.

Addendum

The solution checked below worked fine. Then after running the site awhile I noticed two problems:

1. all pages began to appear unstyled. I reloaded, cleared the cache, etc., but still no-style. I've had this trouble before, and can't locate the source.

2. There's a directory AND an html file named 'gallery', so the /gallery link shows a directory listing instead of the html file. I should be able to sort that one, but further tips welcome :-)

Solution 1:

Try this rule:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule !.*\.html$ %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html [L]

This will rewrite all requests that can be mapped to an existing file when appending a .html.

Solution 2:

The previous answers don't check if the requested path is a directory.

Here is the full rewrite condition which doesn't rewrite, if requested path is a directory (as stated by the original question):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d          # is not directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f     # is an existing html file
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html                   # rewrite index to index.html

To be SEO friendly and avoid double content, redirect the .html urls:

# Redirects domain.com/file.html to domain.com/file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d          # is not directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f     # is an existing html file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.+)\.html$      # request URI ends with .html
RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]        # redirect from index.html to index

If you need the same for scripts take a look here: How can I use .htaccess to hide .php URL extensions?

Solution 3:

The accepted solution do not works when the website is configured with a virtual host / document root.

There is the solution I used:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule !.*\.html$ %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html [L]