Permalinks not working in subdirectory on plesk

Hello,

I have recently taken over a new site to redevelop. My normal proceedure is to duplicate the existing site into a sub folder. Eg. /dev and complete the development in there for preview purposes before deployment.

I have done this for this site and it is all working in /dev for the home page and the wordpress admin. Process: I copied the files to /dev, I duplicated the database and ran a search and replace to change all URL’s to include /dev. I double checked that options for siteurl and home are set to include /dev in the url. I also adjusted the rewrites in the .htaccess file in /dev however that doesn’t seem to be working.

My code is as follows:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /dev/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /dev/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

This is all very stock standard and it should work however the permalinks are just not working and when I try to visit a page such as /dev/contact it gets redirected to just /contact.

This is a permalinks issue as if the disable permalinks it does not happen.

The thing is that I cannot seem to fix the permalinks in the subfolder and I’m pretty sure I’ve covered all bases (please let me know if I have missed something). The problem seems to be that even if I delete the .htaccess file and reset the permalinks a new .htaccess file is not created on the server. Even if I do a completely fresh install of wordpress in /dev and then turn on permalinks they still don’t work. Again a htaccess file is not created. So I add my own manually created .htaccess file as outlined above however it doesn’t work in the /dev folder.

I normally work with cpanel servers and this would all work perfectly on cpanel.

Is there something about plesk which means .htaccess and thus permalinks don’t work in subfolders?

If so how do I fix this?

Thanks ??