Forcing trailing backslash in .htaccess causing 404 error - apache

Question

I'm trying to find the correct .htaccess config to force a trailing slash after every URL, but it's causing 404's in many instances.
I have the following directory structure:-
articles
post.html
portfolio
lorum1.html
lorum2.html
lorum3.html
contact.html
Example 1
So if I go to:-
myurl.com/articles/post.html or
myurl.com/articles/post or
myurl.com/articles/post/
I need these to all redirect to the .html, but with the url showing:
myurl.com/articles/post/
Example 2
So if I go to myurl.com/contact/, it needs to display the content of myurl.com/contact.html, whilst still maintaining the myurl.com/contact/ url.
What's currently happening
Here's an example using the contact path. I get a 200 response if I go to myurl.com/contact and myurl.com/contact.html, but a 404 if I go to myurl.com/contact/.
Here's what I have so far.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
# Remove .html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
# Force trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
I'm struggling to make sense of this problem, so thanks in advance to anybody who can help!

Answer 1

Your example is very close to hitting your requirements. The problem is that the first RewriteRule is matching ^(.*)$, which in regex terms is equal to matching literally anything.
Your rules can be implemented by adding the missing forward slash to the regex before the end-position metacharacter $, meaning that the regex will now match anything, as long as it ends with a forward slash: ^(.*)/$
Fixed:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
# Remove .html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.html
# Force trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
However while trying to understand Apache's syntax I think I found a much simpler solution to achieve the same:
RewriteEngine on
# Rewrite requests ending in a slash to show the html file
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1.html
# If the request uri doesn't end in .html...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(html?)$
# ...rewrite requests that don't end in a slash so that they do end in a slash
RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ /$1$2/ [R=303]