Wordpress %postname% permalinks break static homepage (301)

Question

so I am having this issue for a while now, and I cannot seem to find a fitting solution.

Whenever I enable %postname% permalinks, my static homepage https://example.com/xy stops working and delivers 301 “site is not redirecting properly” errors, while any other posts or pages on the site redirect properly, example https://example.com/xy/about-us works.

If I revert back to plain links, I have no issues. Two things that I’ve noticed are, if I add “index.php” at the end of the homepage it will load again, example https://example.com/xy/index.php.

%postname% permalinks also work if I set site url inside a wp-config.php like this

define( ‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com/xy’ );

define( ‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com/xy’ );

However I am required to keep site url path relative, so this is not a desired fix.

I’ve tried disabling all plugins and changing theme to default to no avail. I've enabled AllowOverride for my root directory. I have mod rewrite enabled in apache, my .htaccess is generated by WP and looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /xy/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /xy/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

So I worked around this issue by adding following into my functions.php

function disable_front_page_redirects($redirect_url) {
        if( is_front_page() ) {
                $redirect_url = false;
        }

        return $redirect_url;
}

add_filter( 'redirect_canonical', 'disable_front_page_redirects' );