I figured it out. For some reason I needed to edit the main /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file and add an entry for my working directory there. For some reason the conf file in sites-available wasn’t good enough for wordpress. Any idea why this is??
Yeah, its not the server. It’s funny because I’ve had this problem before, many times before! It has always been a wordpress installation. I host multiple websites from this same server. All apps built with the Laravel framework. All of them use mod- rewrite, all of them work flawlessly.