I have used CI 3.x in many projects without index.php in the URL.
How I do that:
.htaccess:
# based on CI 3.x documentation
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [PT,L]
or
# based on earlier CI
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|assets|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [PT,L]
CI 3.x config:
$config['base_url'] = 'http://mypc.local';
$config['index_page'] = '';
$config['uri_protocol'] = 'REQUEST_URI';
With configurations above:
it works for http://mypc.local/home
it works for http://mypc.local/index.php/home
it works for other websites which don't utilize GC
it works for http://mypc.local/index.php/examples (GC)
BUT not for http://mypc.local/examples (GC)
it always shows:
Service unavailable!
anyone can help?