.htaccess only allow access to index.php and a directory - php

Question

I am using
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*$ ./index.php
to redirect all my website traffic through index.php and let my php code get the request_uri and route each request accordingly.
I want to restrict access to all other files/directories except one that will contain the js files, css files, images etc.
I found that to do that I can use:
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
<Files index.php>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
</Files>
and then have another .htaccess file inside the public directory to allow certain file types.
When I navigate to localhost/mysite/index.php it works fine since the index.php file is accessible.
But for any other url I get a 403, for example /mysite/home/ is forbidden even though I expected it to work normally.
What can I do get the expected behavior?
My full .htacces file is:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^.*$ ./index.php
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
<Files index.php>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
</Files>
EDIT: The /public/.htaccess currently looks like this:
<Files ~ "\.(xml|css|jpe?g|png|gif|js|pdf)$">
Allow from all
</Files>

Answer 1

Try this code in /mysite/.htaccess:
DirectoryIndex index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
RewriteRule !^(public/|index\.php) [NC,F]

Answer 2

You can use:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php
That is the .htaccess I use for my applications. In the public directory, I only place index.php and JS, CSS and images file that I need, so there is no need to filter them out. Any other file (such as uploads), are save to a folder outside of the public folder - so they are no accessible directly - only via a php script that reads them. I believe that is "best practice".