.htaccess headers being ignored by Apache

Question

I have a website that uses the same core .htaccess details as many other websites; however this website does not properly load the .htaccess directives

Answer 1

It is not so much FastCGI as it is mod_proxy_fcgi, the method of asking Apache to "execute" FastCGI by passing it to some other listener.

When you use any mod_proxy* module, .htaccess isn't processed at all, because you're acting as a proxy and short-circuiting any disk-related configuration sections.

php-fpm will be looking at the request URL and reading data from disk, but Apache isn't. It is just confusing to people because they can be running on the same host and the files are often in a directory httpd could serve directly.