How can PHP be used to ensure that index.php is always accessed before index.html, especially in the context of browser caching?

When a browser caches a webpage, it stores a local copy of the page to load it faster in subsequent visits. To ensure that index.php is always accessed before index.html, we can use PHP to set the appropriate headers to control caching behavior. By sending a cache-control header with a no-cache directive for index.html, we can instruct the browser to always request index.php from the server. 

<?php
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/index.html') {
    header('Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate');
    header('Pragma: no-cache');
    header('Expires: 0');
    header('Location: /index.php');
    exit;
}
?>

Keywords

PHP index.php index.html browser caching header manipulation

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