.htaccess redirect root to index.php

Question

I need to redirect from http://example.com/ to http://example.com/index.php.

Answer 1

Just to add my own solution, since the answer of Michael did not work for me, I did something like:

RewriteEngine on

# These two lines redirect non-www to www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com$1 [R=301,L]

# These two lines redirect the root to index.html.
RewriteRule ^$ /index.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [R=301,L]

This also preserves any possible existing query string parameters.