.htaccess check if file exists in multiple sub-folders and rewrite

Question

Let's suppose that I have a static website on Apache server with this folders structure:

http://www.example.com

|    

+-- /news/

|  |  

|  +-- page1.html

|  +-- page2.html

|  +-- ...

|

+-- /otherstuff/

The url of the pages inside the /news/ folder is:

http://www.example.com/news/page1.html  

http://www.example.com/news/page2.html

Now, the number of files in the /news/ folder is growing and I would like to create new subfolders inside /news/ and split files across these new dirs, but I also want to hide the subfolders names in the urls.

The new folders structure will be:

http://www.example.com

|    

+-- /news/

|  |  

|  +-- /subfolder1/

|  |   |

|  |   +-- page1.html

|  |

|  +-- /subfolder2/

|  |   |

|  |   +-- page2.html

|  +-- ...

|

+-- /otherstuff/

but the urls of the pages have to remain the same:

http://www.example.com/news/page1.html  

http://www.example.com/news/page2.html

and not:

http://www.example.com/news/subfolder1/page1.html  

http://www.example.com/news/subfolder2/page2.html

Is there a way to achive this result using rewrite rules in .htaccess?

I've read this question:
How to use mod_Rewrite to check multiple folders for a static file

but the accepted answer does not work for me.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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Answer 1

you can use the following rule in /news/.htaccess :

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/subfolder/$1.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*?)\.html$ /news/subfolder/$1 [L]

This will rewrite /news/file.html to /news/subfolder/file.html if file.html exists in /news/subfolder/ .

If your htaccess is in root, you can try the following

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/news/subfolder/$1.html -f
RewriteRule ^news/(.*?)\.html$ /news/subfolder/$1.html [L]

If the examples above fail, you can try this in root or news/.htaccess :

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(?:news/)?(.*?)\.html$ /news/subfolder/$1.html [L]

.htaccess check if file exists in multiple sub-folders and rewrite

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