Trying to get some of my code running on a fresh Ubuntu install with an apt-get’d version of Apache I discovered things don’t run like they should.

It turns out the maintainers of the Apache package ship it in a less than ready to use state, the most notable I’ve found that mod_rewite is not enabled.

To get things back on track I enabled mod_rewrite a2enmod rewrite

Then I needed to edit the Apache configuration files to allow .htaccess overrides. Depending or your install these could be anywhere – I grepped and the relevant Dir entries where located here /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Since this is a development server I wasn’t conservative and set it to all AllowOverride All

Then I just needed to restart Apache

service apache2 restart

too easy

Getting unexpected reslults from MooTools? Use the console to check the version

MooTools.version

Remarkably shared hosts out there are still using PHP4 which irks me to no end, thankfully we can use .htaccess to force Apache to use PHP5.

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php