A simple 301 redirect creates an infinite loop in my htaccess?

Question

I had this url on my website example.com/foo.php and I changed it to example.com/foo by doing this in my htaccess:

RewriteRule ^foo$ foo.php [NC,L]

And it works fine. However I'd like to do a 301 redirect from the old url to the new url. So I added this line in my htaccess:

RewriteRule ^foo.php$ http://example.com/foo [L,NC,R=301]

And I get an infinite loop of redirects... How to fix that?

Answer 1

You can avoid the loop error using THE_REQUEST variable :

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /foo\.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^foo\.php$ http://example.com/foo [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^foo$ foo.php [NC,L]

Or if you are on apache 2.4, you can use the END flag

RewriteRule ^foo\.php$ http://example.com/foo [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^foo$ foo.php [NC,END]