My root directory has the following structure:
/assets/
/pages/
/.htaccess
index.pp
Inside /pages/ I have PHP files. For example,projects.php. I tried writing in .htaccess rules to take the URL example.com/projects and open the file from /pages/projects.php and it worked with the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} . [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
# No file extension on request then append .php and rewrite to subdir
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.+)
RewriteRule !\.[a-z0-4]{2,4}$ /pages/%1.php [NC,L]
# All remaining requests simply get rewritten to the subdir
RewriteRule (.*) /pages/$1 [L]
My problem here is that when I go to the root example.com, instead of opening index.php it’s opening the /pages/ directory, but if I go explicitly to example.com/index.php it works.
I don’t want index.php to be shown in the URL, so I need to exclude the root from my rule and make it open index.php while the URL stays example.com.
# All remaining requests simply get rewritten to the subdir RewriteRule (.*) /pages/$1 [L]
To exclude "the root" being rewritten to /pages/ (and serve index.php from the root instead) you can simply change the quantifier in the last rule from * (0 or more) to + (1 or more) - so that it doesn't match requests for the root (an empty URL-path in .htaccess).
In other words:
RewriteRule (.+) /pages/$1 [L]
Incidentally, you have already done something similar in the preceding rule/condition by using + in the CondPattern, ie. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /(.+).