I have been looking for an answer for a few hours now, so sorry if this was asked a ton of times, I missed it. I basically want to make a rewrite to ignore the first directory. That first dir in the path will be different so I thought I could use a regex. But my regex is matching all the way to the file name: RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)?/(.+)$ $2 [L] this works if I am one level deep: http://test.domain.com/one/index.php I get the actual index page of the root. Which is what I want. but if I were to go deeper: http://test.domain.com/one/two/index.php I get a message saying /index.php was not found. So it seems my regex is not stopping after the last [a-z]. I appreciate any help. This is Apache2 if that matters at all.