After Starting Up Yii Project with Git you can try open up your browser and navigate to http://www.example.com/project/ and you will then notice the links are like http://www.example.com/project/index.php?r=site/contact and http://www.example.com/project/index.php?r=site/page&view=about.

URL Routes

This can be archived easily via uncommenting the urlManager located in ./protected/config/main.php.

// uncomment the following to enable URLs in path-format
'urlManager'=>array(
  'urlFormat'=>'path',
  'rules'=>array(
    '<controller:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/view',
    '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
    '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
  ),
),

Refresh the page and you will notice that the URLs have been changed to http://www.example.com/project/index.php/site/contact and http://www.example.com/project/index.php/site/page?view=about.

Further Makeup

You can further cleanup the URLs by removing index.php and adding a suffix .html to the URLs.

// uncomment the following to enable URLs in path-format
'urlManager'=>array(
  'urlFormat'=>'path',
  'showScriptName'=>false,
  'urlSuffix'=>'.html',
  'rules'=>array(
    '<controller:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/view',
    '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
    '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
  ),
),

Refresh the page and you will notice that the URLs have been changed to http://www.example.com/project/site/contact.html and http://www.example.com/project/site/page.html?view=about.

Notice that the generated URLs will get a 404 Error if you don’t add the follow .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)\?*$ index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

You can now enjoy the prettified SEO-friendly URLs.

Conclusion

Making SEO-friendly URLs makes your web application search engines optimized and compatible.