Change Document Root for Wordpress


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For the simplest way to give WordPress its own directory while having it show up as the root of your domain please do the following:

Log into your Wordpress Admin.

  1. Go to the General panel.
  2. In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory's URL. Example: http://example.com
  3. Do the same as step 2 for home url


Next, you will want to either update the document root for your website or add an .htaccess file to the root of your website with the following RewriteRules:

Option 1:

To change your document root, please click here article which covers the steps required to update your websites root directory.

Option 2:

/web/domain.com/.htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress redirect
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wordpress/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/$1
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress redirect

Alternative option, which follows mostly the same steps is to do the following:

  1. Go to the General panel.
  2. In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory's URL. Example: http://example.com
  3. Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
  4. Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the WordPress (wordpress in our example) directory into the root directory of your site; the latter is probably named something like www or public_html. The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you'll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory.
  5. Edit your root directory's index.php.
    1. Open your root directory's index.php file in a text editor
    2. Change the line that says: require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/wp-blog-header.php' );
      to the following: require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php' );
    3. Save the file.
  6. Login to your site (if you aren't still already). The URL should still be http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/
  7. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the appropriate file permissions. If WordPress can't write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)