Please forgive my lack of knowledge, this is more of a learning project than anything else.

I have a linux box, and it works pretty much fine. When i go to example.com/css it says theres one file in there, bootstrap.min.css When i go to example.com/css/bootstrap.min.css, it gives me a 404 error.

I have only one htaccess file to remove the index.php from the url, which also i renamed to htaccess (Instead of .htaccess, so apache wont find it) and i restarted the server, yet no help. I also tried to chmod the css file 755 but no help.

Contents of the htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /

 # Allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L,QSA]

Please help, i am very confused about this. I tried to google excessively but i came up with nothing.

Edit: I found the solution to be renamed the htaccess file to something entirely different and restarting. Is there any way i can still implement the losing of the .php?