Hide directory name in URL - php

Question

I have been trying to hide a folder name from a URL and I'm failing miserably. My URL id 0.0.0.0/project/api/api/foo. As you can see there are two api's and I only want to show one. The .htaccess I have been working with resides on the root of the directory and looks like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /api/api/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
I've tried a couple different variations of this but nothing is working. The first api is a directory name and the second api is something Laravel puts in for a route and is not a directory. It's ugly to have both, so how can I remove the first api?

Answer 1

There is no need to mess with the .htaccess. You just need to update your routes file to not include the second api path.
You can either remove the leading api segment you've manually defined on your routes, or you can remove the automated api prefix that Laravel adds by default to all routes in the routes/api.php file.
To remove the default prefix, open your app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php file, go to the mapApiRoutes() method at the bottom, and remove the 'prefix' => 'api', line.

Answer 2

To make the server accept your requests you can use this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^project/api/(.*)$ /project/api/api/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
This rule will make every request to YOURDOMAIN/project/api/SOMETHING looks (in your server) as if the actual request was YOURDOMAIN/project/api/api/SOMETHING
However - node that you need to make sure that the links inside your website/application are correct.