Hiding folder name in URL using .htaccess

Question

I have a folder in my root directory called pages that I would like to hide from the URL when accessed. Currently, my URL looks like this: www.foo.com/pages/page.html

I would like to remove the folder name pages in the URL but still direct users to the folder. How can I do this using the .htaccess file? For clarity, I would like the final URL to look like this:
www.foo.com/page.html

I've taken a look at some StackOverflow answers and I am struggling to understand how I would edit my .htaccess file to make this adjustment. So far, this is what my .htaccess file looks like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^pages/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1 [L]

How do I change www.foo.com/pages/page.html to www.foo.com/page.html using .htaccess?

Answer 1

You actually need 2 rules to manage this:

1. A 301/302 redirect if a URL already has /pages/ (usually a cached URL in browsers / search results)
2. An internal (silent) rewrite to add /pages/ at the start of URIs to serve the right page from your host

You can have these rule in your site root .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On

# To externally redirect /pages/pages.html to /page.html
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /pages/([^\s?]*)[\s?] [NC]
RewriteRule ^ /%1 [R=302,NE,L]

## To internally rewrite /pages.html to /pages/page.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/pages/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* pages/$0 [L]

Once you have verified that rules are working fine, you can then change 302 to 301 to make it a permanent redirect.