A much easier way is to use the power of mod_rewrite via a .htaccess file. It rewrites the URL on the server end to seamlessly "pretend" the subfolder is the root. It’s power is a lot more than doing just that, but it’s a common thing to use it for.
This code should work for you. Put a text file named .htaccess in the root folder, and make the contents of it to be this. Note that your server needs to have mod_rewrite configured/installed for Apache although it probably already is.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule [^/]$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?[^/.]+$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ beta/$1 [L]
I don’t know if you know how to use mod_rewrite or not, but here’s a rundown of what this all does. There’s actually some extra code in here that isn’t completely necessary for just making the root of the site point to the beta folder, but my experience with mod_rewrite has led me to figure out that this "extra" code I’ve written/found makes things work better.
The first line simply tells Apache that mod_rewrite is going to be used. The second line really doesn’t have any effect with your setup, but it doesn’t hurt to include it. It simply tells mod_rewrite that the base path on the site that points to the current folder is the root. For example, if I had an alias or something set up to tell my server that www.example.com/test should really point to a folder called test2 instead of test, my .htaccess file in the test2 folder would need "RewriteBase /test" to tell mod_rewrite that the relative URL path for this folder is /test instead of the actual folder /test2. If that’s confusing, feel free to look up RewriteBase, but in most cases you won’t need it anyway. I just use it for consistency. The block of 5 lines that follows adds a trailing slash to the URL if necessary (if it doesn’t have one and if it’s a folder) to make things easier to work with. This is actually a more complicated way of adding a trailing slash than most people would do, but I wrote this code to be more accurate. It only adds a slash if A) it’s guaranteed to be a folder or B) we know for sure it’s not a file. The reason we can’t just check if it’s a folder and add a slash if there isn’t one, is because when you’re using mod_rewrite in other subfolders, a lot of your URLs won’t point to real files or folders because mod_rewrite in those subfolders will tell the server where to actually look for those files and folders. So we make our best guess and say that if the URL doesn’t end with what looks like a filename (so it doesn’t have a dot), then it is most likely is a folder and it’s safe to add the slash. The last three lines are the important ones. They take any requests to the root folder and reroute them to the beta subfolder without the user knowing. The URL will still be www.example.com, but the server will be retrieving the files from www.example.com/beta.
I hope that all helps.
I’d be glad to explain anything more about that code if you have questions. If you already know how to use mod_rewrite, then you probably didn’t need that explanation at all, but I figured I’d be thorough.
Edit: I added two more lines to the code near the end that check if the requested file/folder exists before rerouting to the beta subfolder. That way if you have another subfolder of root, test, you can still get to www.example.com/test. However, if we go to, say, www.example.com/why and why does not really exist, the server will be looking for it at beta/why. Again, if you need any more explanation, I’d be glad to give it.
Edit 2: By the way, using the above code, you will still be able to go to www.example.com/beta. If you want that to redirect to www.example.com just so it looks nicer in case somebody is still using that URL after the switch, I can give you the code to do that as well. Just let me know!
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