For Ubunutu 18.04 inside a vagrant box ... This is what helped me
Ensure www-data has permissions to the .htaccess file
sudo chown www-data.www-data .htaccess
edit the apache2 conf to allow for symlinks etc
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Add this to the file
<Directory /var/www/html/>_x000D_
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks_x000D_
AllowOverride all_x000D_
Require all granted_x000D_
</Directory>
_x000D_
Restart your apache2 server
sudo service apache2 restart
I hope this helps someone.