Serve wordpress at root for existing subdirectory install

Looking at another site I have set up in a similar way, here’s how I think this should work:

In the database, all the stored urls should be of the form:
www.example.com/subdirectory/ EXCEPT the siteurl, which should be without the subdirectory.

The .htaccess file should look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

The root site index.php should have:
require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/subdirectory/wp-blog-header.php' );

While the subdirectory index.php should have:
require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/wp-blog-header.php' );

At least, that’s how my other site is set up, and it works. But not here.

This will redirect your domain from your account’s root to its actual location anywhere:

# BlueHost.com
# .htaccess main domain to subdirectory redirect
# Do not change this line.
RewriteEngine on
# Change example.com to be your main domain.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example.com$
# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subdirectory/
# Don't change the following two lines.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdirectory/$1
# Change example.com to be your main domain again.
# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain
# followed by / then the main file for your site, index.php, index.html, etc.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ subdirectory/index.html [L]

Then along with that, it sounds to me like you will need the couple of temporary lines either in wp-config.php or your theme’s functions.php to tell your database to use https://www.mysite.com …but I do not have those handy at the moment. Also, I believe you will need to change that last line above to index.php.

Thanks for this.

I think when you properly install WordPress to a subdirectory, it does the redirection without using a RewriteRule like your example in the .htaccess file, though. I have several other sites installed in subdirectories on other URLS, and their .htaccess files are as I posted, without the subdirectory redirect. Thoughts?

OKAY: so, hardcoding the siteURL and Home by adding these lines to the wp-config.php file:
`define(‘WP_HOME’,’https://www.example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’https://www.example.com/subdirectory’);’

SOLVES the admin redirect, and now hey presto the site loads correctly.

I’m out of time to work on this today, but my suspicion is that the plugin WP-Supercache, which also writes RedirectRules to the .htaccess file, is not picking up the cues and is interfering with whatever WordPress is doing.

I’ll post back whatever I figure out. But it’s nice to know I can fix the admin redirect loop by adding those lines to the wp-config.php file.

I think when you properly install WordPress to a subdirectory, it does the redirection without using a RewriteRule like your example in the .htaccess file, though. I have several other sites installed in subdirectories on other URLS, and their .htaccess files are as I posted, without the subdirectory redirect. Thoughts?

I might not get this put into words well, but yes, I believe there is a difference-of-approach here since I began learning things much later in the game than others, and also from the vantage point of *beginning* with a Primary Domain being redirected to sub-folder without having to modify anything at all within WordPress. So, I have *never* had to do anything I call “tricky” in order to relocate a domain, but my observations here in the forums cause me to believe what I call “tricky” used to be the only way and is still something necessary for people developing locally. For a Primary Domain, I use the above code to redirect it from public_html to wherever it might actually be, and for Add-Ons and sub-domains, I use cPanel to assign and point them…and every domain I have (other than my sub-domain) in whatever sub-folder has nothing other than https://thisdomain.com in each of the boxes at Dashboard > Settings > General and I have no broken links. So then, and where what I have going is useless to some folks, it seems all the stuff I call “tricky” at least can be completely unnecessary for certain others.

Edit: There is at least one caveat here since I have just (yesterday) discovered BulletProof Security (mentioned only as an example here) uses “actual server path” for certain things within itself, so one of the domains I had moved to a different (renamed) folder actually *did* have a broken link within the internal code written by that plugin. Re-installation of that plugin can easily fix that, of course, but I am first going to try a database edit.