Using pretty URLs

The URL format is very important for SEO. People do not pay attention to URLs (some browsers does not display them at all), but search engines make correspondences between text in the page and the URL.

Until now, we have used this type of URL index.php?r=site/index or index.php?r=site/about, where r indicates the parameter route to follow. Now, we will see how to change these formats in site/index and site/about, that are more easily readable and useful for search engines.

In order to use pretty URLs, we need to configure Yii2 to handle them, and this can be done in a couple of minutes.

First of all, we must ensure that all requests are rewritten to web/index.php. In Linux, we can change web server configuration using Apache and insert the .htaccess file in Yii2's app root folder, if this file does not exist. The .htaccess file allows us to override some default configuration of the web server.

Note

In the Linux environment, the filename starting with dot indicates that this...