Enable mod_rewrite Apache 2.4 on Ubuntu 14.04 - apache

Question

So I've gone through most of the questions on this topic, but I still seem to having issues. I can't seem to rewrite any URLs using an htaccess.
Details: Using Apache 2.4 and Ubuntu 14.04
I do have mod_rewrite enabled as can be seen by the following two pieces of information:
$: apachectl -M
Loaded Modules:
....
rewrite_module (shared)
....
$: ls /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
.... rewrite.load ....
I tried restarting apache using the following three methods:
$: service apache2 restart
$: apachectl restart
$: apachectl graceful
And nothing is working. In order to test things fully, I added a log level in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf as follows:
LogLevel notice rewrite:trace8
Which if I understand correctly means that almost all information on rewrite should be going to my error logs, BUT I am not getting any log information.
Finally, the rewrite portion in my .htaccess is as follows:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[^.]+\.[^.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www2.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301]
I put www2 instead of www because for some reason it's already redirecting website.com to www.website.com so I'm wondering if it's the browser that's automatically doing it. Oddly, it also automatically changes website.com/index.php to www.website.com
Is there anything I might be missing that might be causing this? It seems like it's rewriting something (or it's the browser doing something), but when I try and rewrite it to a bad url for it to fail, it doesn't fail and instead goes to the proper url.
Any thoughts?
Edit
Forgot to include that, I have the following in my directory:
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all denied
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
So I do have AllowOverride set to All for the directory that everything lives in.

Answer 1

I assume that you want to force www URLs.
Now, if you're using just one domain (i.e: example.com), try:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
If you have several domains over there, try:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[^\.]+\.[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301]
Note that this one won't match third (or more) level domains. To deal with these, consider using RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\., but again, watch out for sub-domain cases.
Also watch for QSA flag in your RewriteRules, you may need to add it.