.htaccess being ignored - Ubuntu 14.04 - apache

Question

I'm trying to use the .htaccess file on my Apache server.
Here is what my .htaccess looks like
# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|svg|woff|eot|ttf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
</FilesMatch>
# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|png|gif|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>
# Add correct content-type for fonts
AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
AddType font/ttf .ttf
AddType font/otf .otf
AddType font/x-woff .woff
AddType image/svg+xml .svg
# Compress compressible fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf font/otf image/svg+xml
I enabled mod_rewrite using a2enmod rewrite
The tutorials I followed told me to edit the file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default but there isn't a file by the name default in that folder. There was a 000-default.conf instead in the same path. But that file didn't have the part
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
which I'm supposed to edit.
This is the contents of 000-default.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that
# the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating
# redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName
# specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to
# match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this
# value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless.
# However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly.
#ServerName www.example.com
ServerAdmin webmaster#localhost
# Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
# error, crit, alert, emerg.
# It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
# modules, e.g.
#LogLevel info ssl:warn
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
# For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
# enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
# include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
# following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
# after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
#Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf
</VirtualHost>
# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet
However /etc/apache2/apache2.conf had the exact same part. So I replaced AllowOverride None over there to AllowOverride All. I restarted the server after that.
However the .htaccess file is still not being loaded. If I add gibberish to the .htaccess file everything still works fine meaning it didn't get loaded.
What did I miss here?

Answer 1

First of all, the name of the file doesn't really matters. 000-default.conf, while not really common seems good to me.
Modify your site configuration
There are 2 major things you have to consider when serving .htaccess files :
AccessFileName .htaccess
AllowOverride All
As said in the apache2 doc, you must declare AllowOverride in a Directory section. That's why it didn't work when setting it in main config file.
I'd advise you to just paste those 4 lines in /etc/apache2/000-default.conf inside the Virtualhost section and it should work:
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
(assuming your root directory is /var/www)
You don't have to set AccessFileName as default is .htaccess.
If it doesn't work and you have more than 1 file in /etc/apache2/sites-available
Apache might use another config thant 000-default.conf. Just check which of those are symlinked to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. If there's still more than 1, you might want to disable every other enabled site just to be sure.
If it still doesn't work, just check file ownership & permissions.

Answer 2

The isssue was that I was placing the .htaccess file in /var/www/ while my DocumentRoot for my website was pointing to a different directory. Moving the .htaccess file to that folder solved the issue.