Fixing .htaccess in Apache with Ubuntu 12

I have an ordinary Apache installation on an Ubuntu 12 OS, where the root webserver directory is ordinarily pointing to /var/www. I have many subdirectories within it, and I’d like to have one of these subdirectories using clean URLs, specifically becaused I was testing some RESTful API stuff. However, I’ve struggled a bit to make Apache recognize my .htaccess file.

So, after some minor stress, here it is the quick step-by-step guide of what I did, without further explanations:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Within the Directory /var/www directive, change AllowOverride None by AllowOverride All. Then run these two commands:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo service apache2 restart

And all of sudden it started working.