.htaccess is ignored even though VirtualHost has "AllowOverride All"

Unbelievable. Remember how I said this is a development server? Yeah.. well here's what my virtual host entry REALLY looks like:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName              dev.ourwebsite.com
    DocumentRoot            /var/www/html/dev.ourwebsite.com/docroot
    <Directory "/var/www/html/ourwebsite.com/docroot">
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All

        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Do you see it? Well I didn't. I FORGOT To change my "Directory" entry to dev.ourwebsite.com instead of ourwebsite.com -- and that made all the difference. I just assumed that Apache would have thrown an error if the directory didn't exist; but that only applies to the DocumentRoot directive. is match-based -- meaning it applies the rules if it matches the incoming request, but otherwise, it doesn't care if you tell it to AllowOverride on magic unicorns.

Let this be a lesson to any others who come looking -- when all else fails, consider the almighty Typo.

Check out if any other "AllowOverride None" presented in 'httpd.conf' above the virtualhosts declaration. Probably, you have "AllowOverride None" in docroot.