Apache not allowing .htaccess

Question

I upgraded my Ubuntu to 14.04 LTS and Apache to 2.4. When the server first started back up I was getting 403 errors visiting pages. This is when I learned I needed to change to Require all granted. I thought I had everything working till I realized .htaccess was not being loaded anywhere. I thought that needed to be changed as well, but the Apache docs says it's fine from what I can find. Below is my Directory rule currently.

VirtualDocumentRoot /var/hosts/%-2.0.%-1.0/%-3+/public_html <DirectoryMatch "^/var/hosts/[^/]+/[^/]+/public_html"> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </DirectoryMatch> 

My first thought was the regex was wrong and none of the rules were being loaded. So I commented out the Require all granted and saw it stopped websites from loading again. So I knew it was loading them. I had to do the below to get them to work.

<Directory /var/hosts/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> 

Am I ok to leave it with this? Any thoughts why it isn't working?

Answer 1

Try this:

1. Configure Apache mod_rewrite

   a2enmod rewrite 

2. add the following code to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

   AllowOverride All 

3. Restart Apache

   /etc/init.d/apache2 restart 

Answer 2

I solved my issue.

It seems Apache 2.4 has issues with [^/]+ to match a directory. I was able to make it work with * instead. It matches everything but a /.

I had come across this issue again with trying to secure any subdomain of dev. I saw that specifying the domain instead of using REGEX would work within the VirtualHost.

After looking over the Directory docs I learned about * and gave it a shot. Also learned that DirectoryMatch does not affect subdirectories and that Directory allows REGEX.