Remove index.php from Laravel Urls

It is currently possible to access your application from both two different URLS which could affect your SEO.

The benefit of doing it as a middleware in the application is that it will work regardless of the server environment, i.e. you run running Apache, NGINX, or something else.

/blog/some-article
/index.php/blog/some-article

To remove this behavior create a new middleware:

php artisan make:middleware RemoveIndexMiddleware

add the following contents

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;

class RemoveIndexMiddleware
{
    /**
     * Handle an incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
     * @param  \Closure(\Illuminate\Http\Request): (\Illuminate\Http\Response|\Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse)  $next
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response|\Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse
     */
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        $request_uri = Str::start($request->getRequestUri(), '/');
        if (Str::startsWith($request_uri, '/index.php')) {

            $clean_url = $request->getSchemeAndHttpHost();
            $clean_url .= Str::start(Str::replaceFirst('/index.php', '', $request_uri), '/');

            return redirect($clean_url,  301);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Update app/Http/Kernel.php and in the application's global HTTP middleware stack, add your new middleware:

protected $middleware = [
	// .
	// ..
	// ...
	\App\Http\Middleware\RemoveIndexMiddleware::class,
]

Now urls with /index.php will have a permanent redirect not affecting your SEO.