vhosts conf for single page app - angularjs

Question

I have an angular app that I'm serving locally using apache. My vhosts.conf is:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName my.app.com
DirectoryIndex index.html
DocumentRoot /export/www/app
<Directory "/export/www/app">
order allow,deny
allow from all
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.html/$1 [L]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
If I go to the root of the app everything loads fine. I do some navigation within the app which brings me to my.app.com/some/location and still no problem.
However if I reload the page at this point I get a 404 error. To get back to the point I want I need to either go back to the root and navigate via the app again or else search by url my.app.com/#/some/location
Is there something that I can do with a rewrite rule so that I don't need the hash to reload the route? I tried to edit my existing rule to:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.html/#/$1 [L]
Any ideas greatly appreciated
C

Answer 1

The issue was that I was using a newer version of apache where the config rules have changed. My updated vhosts now reads
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName my.app.com
DirectoryIndex index.html
DocumentRoot /export/www/app
<Directory "/export/www/app">
order allow,deny
allow from all
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.html [NC,L]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Answer 2

It's weird that my.app.com/some/location works. With AcceptPAthInfo ON, httpd would serve index.html and pass PATH_INFO of /some/location but that shouldn't do the right thing on the client-side JS.
The rewrite you attempted seems like it shiould replace your existing rewrite entirely. But, you'd want to redirect explicitly to non-relative /index.html and add the [R] flag to make sure the redirect goes all the way to the client. Otherwise, it's just an internal substitution, and you need your browser to read the # because that's only handled on the client side.