Allowing .htaccess on your OSX web server

Following this guide as well as the suggestion above, I managed to get .htaccess rewrite working with difficulty and not ideally. I am posting the additional steps I've taken as well as posing my question here incase clwill00 can answer for everyone.

Although, the "Sites" directory I created in my home directory works fine with both html or php pages, when I created an .htaccess file in that directory it did not appear to work. When I troubleshooted the problem (partially using this guide), I found the file was being read. On a forum I read that some servers require the "RewriteBase /" command, which I added. Eventually I figured out that on yosemite 10.10, despite having the the .htaccess file in the "Sites" directory as setup up in the apache config files (see first guide) was redirecting to the default /Library/WebServer/Documents directory with the "RewriteBase /" command (and not working at all without it).

Currently, by putting the the files I want to rewrite to in the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory and the .htaccess file in the "Sites" directory I created and referenced in the apache config files as per the first guide, I have gotten rewrites working to a test PHP file, using the following .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^.*$ test.php

This is fine for me, since I am only using the server for basic testing purposes, but still I would really like to understand the issue and be able to fix it, and others who are using their MAMP server for small scale hosting, etc, may need this info too.

Any help would be appreciated.

I'm not sure what the confusion is.

The apache docs clearly state:

This directive is required when you use a relative path in a substitution in per-directory (htaccess) context