Hide or remove controller name from url in Yii 2.0

You can hide or remove controller name from url in Yii 2.0 through configuring rules for urlManager component. You can hide controller name from url even if your pages are generated dynamically using database after reading this article.

First of all you have to enable pretty permalinks. Read how to enable pretty permalinks and create seo friendly url if you didn’t do so yet. After that let’s try to understand how to configure application rules by simple examples.

For the examples, we have login, logout and register actions under account controller as well as index, about and contact actions under a controller named site. If you have enabled pretty url then there must be an entry in config/web.php configuration file in your project as below:

By default Yii has url route as controller\action our application will be accessible using the following urls:

And we want to display them as:

We can create parameterized rules using aliasing to remove controller name from url in Yii.

Here, we are defining an alias parameter that should be specified in URL. It will be passed as $action parameter to SiteController::actionAbout for about page.

Sometimes you might also need to pass the alias as alias, instead of action. This is a common requirement when we create pages dynamically by passing their id or unique slugs to database. For example:

For this purpose we can specify rule as:

Here, to remove controller name from url in Yii 2.0, we are defining an alias parameter that should be specified in URL after /product/. It can be virtually anything and it will be passed as $alias parameter to CatalogController::actionProduct($alias).