In addition to enabling the rewrite module have you ensured that your root directory is set to AllowOverride All instead of the default AllowOverride None in your virutalhost configuration in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

This setting allows configuration in an .htaccess file to override the configuration files and do things like url rewrites. Once you have changed the configuration file be sure to restart Apache with:

service apache2 restart

Maybe I’m missing something, but the only file in that directory is 000-default.conf and the file is empty. Admittedly I am new to this and may just be missing something.

What did the trick for me was modifying the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Change:

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
</Directory>

To:

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
</Directory>

Reload apache after you modify it.