Redirect subfolder to root folder in Apache, NGINX, IIS and Cloudflare

I had my site under subfolder and I decided to move to the root level of the domain.

The main challenge was to keep all articles on the same path as a subfolder while redirecting the URL to the root of the domain or another location.

Apache

Apache HTTP server supports RewriteCond. To make this change, edit your .htaccess or httpd.conf file and add the below lines to it:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^subfolder/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Here we’re using / as our base and our RewriteRule works for all URLs in our subfolder by using regular expressions. R=301 specifies a permanent redirect.

Nginx

We can achieve similar redirection with the Nginx web server using the rewrite directive in your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:

location ^~ /subfolder {
     rewrite ^/subfolder(.*)$ $1 last;
}

Here ^~ modifier ensures that this prefix location continues to take precedence if you were to add any regex locations in the future.

IIS

In IIS, we can use the Rewrite module to rewrite URLs that are in a subfolder and we want to appear as if they were in the root. You can edit your web.config file in your webroot folder (%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot) with something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="Root_URL_Rewrite" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^(.*)" />
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="/subfolder/{R:0}" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Alternatively, you can additionally use the URL Rewrite UI in IIS Manager to add an inbound rule.

Cloudflare

We can achieve similar redirection using Cloudflare by following below steps:

Log into your Cloudflare account.
Click the appropriate Cloudflare account for the domain where you want to add URL forwarding.
Click the Rules app, then click the Page Rules tab.
Under Page Rules, click Create Page Rule. The Create Page Rule dialog opens for your domain.
Now, under If the URL matches, enter the URL pattern for a subfolder that should match the rule, like https://example.com/subfolder.
Next, click Add a Setting and choose Forwarding URL from the drop-down menu.
Click Select Status Code and choose 301 (Permanent Redirect) or 302 (Temporary Redirect).
Enter the destination URL for your root domain and click Save and Deploy to finish.

The above example is to redirect everything from https://geekflare.com/blog to https://geekflare.com

Wrapping Up

As you can see, redirecting or mapping a subfolder to root or another URL is a common task and is supported by most popular browsers with different options.

Next, find out how you can host multiple websites on a single IP.