can i activate .htaccess with my ipaddress and not a domain name?

Formatting added…

the tutorial indicates that i have to update
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf where example.com is my ipaddress
this doesn't work as it opens a new file.

Of course it does… That's what nano does when you ask it to edit a file that doesn't exist.

i discovered the config file is 000-default.conf and making modification to this file doesn't solve the problem
i added the following to the block

<directory example.com="" html="" public_html="" var="" www=""> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </directory>

This is not a valid <Directory> directive. See:

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#directory

-- sw