Remove index.php from the URL in Laravel

I've discovered an unwanted behaviour in one of my projects. This was not used to be so, Google indexed a url with index.php in it and gave a duplicate canonical notification.

It happend on a URL like this:

https://robindirksen.com/blog
https://robindirksen.com/index.php/blog

After I noticed it, I want to other known Laravel projects and discovered the same.

https://ohdear.app/feature/uptime-monitoring
https://ohdear.app/index.php/feature/uptime-monitoring

And also on the Laravel website self.

https://laravel.com/docs/6.x/validation
https://laravel.com/index.php/docs/6.x/validation

I contacted Mattias Geniar (from OhDear!) and he was really quick with a solution. The solution can be found on his personal blog, ma.ttias.be.

Personally I like this approach, because it's a known issue so it should be fixed in the framework itself and not on the server, like in nginx.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

class RouteServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function map(Router $router)
    {
        $this->removeIndexPhpFromUrl();
    }

    /**		
     * This will remove the index.php from the URL and prevent canonical conflicts.
     *
     * @return void	
     */
    protected function removeIndexPhpFromUrl()
    {
        if (Str::contains(request()->getRequestUri(), '/index.php/')) {
            $url = str_replace('index.php/', '', request()->getRequestUri());

            if (strlen($url) > 0) {
                header("Location: $url", true, 301);
                exit;
            }
        }
    }
}