Redirect index.php to root in .htaccess

Question

I installed Magento on my shared hosting server. I have made all the necessary changes in magento admin panel. All the url's work fine. But the only problem is I can access my products on the store using:

http://mydomain.com/category/product.html and also with http://mydomain.com/index.php/category/product.html

So I want to know how I can get rid of index.php. I want to redirect the url which consists of index.php to the url without index.php

Before posting here I checked the magento forums and also searched on stackoverflow but found no success.

Answer 1

You can capture the part after index.php and redirect the client with

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^index\.php/(.+)$ /$1 [R,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php/?$ / [R,L]

This redirects all requests starting with index.php/ to the URL without index.php. Additionally index.php and index.php/ are redirected to the home page.

Update:

To exclude the admin area, you must insert an additional RewriteCond before the first rule

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/admin/

All together gives

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/admin/
RewriteRule ^index\.php/(.+)$ /$1 [R,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php/?$ / [R,L]

Answer 2

If you want to drop index.php from ALL links on your site, this solution actually worked the best for me:

RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1

Source: http://www.lionseo.com/blog/htaccess-redirect-301/