Content Management System (CMS) is a popular web application used to create and manage the digital content. There are many CMSs out there you can select to use such as Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, and so forth. Amongst Many CMSs, Joomla can be your choice to create many types of websites like portals, personal website, small business website, e-commerce, corporate website and other web applications.
When you install Joomla CMS, you have a file called htaccess.txt in the root directory such as public_html (Linux hosting), www, or httpdocs. According to Joomla documentation, for the sake of Joomla SEO, you should rename an htaccess.txt file to a .htaccess file. Depending on whether your Joomla files are still on the local web server on your computer or you have moved to web hosting server, you can use some ways to rename it.
You can use Windows Command Prompt to rename it if your Joomla is still on the local web server. If it is on the web hosting server, you can use the Rename button of the cPanel feature. All you need to know is that, in the Apache web server, the files that are preceded by a dot (.) are the hidden files. After renaming you don't find your .htaccess file, you need to activate Show hidden files (dotfiles) feature in cPanel to show it.
Here are the steps to rename the htaccess.txt file to the .htaccess file in cPanel:
Log in to your cPanel account, in the FILES group, click Files Manager. Make sure you have selected public_html folder (1), select a htaccess.txt file (2), and then click the Rename button (3).
In the Rename dialog box that pops up, in the New file name text box, rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess (1) and then click the Rename File button (2) to save the changes.
Now you can see that the name of the htaccess.txt file has changed to the .htaccess file.
