The steps for installing and configuring APE went fairly smooth for me, except for a small snag. I'm just noting it below for reference.

I was getting 403 Permission denied errors until I configured mod_proxy to Allow from my APE sub domains:

<Proxy *>
        Allow from *.ape-test.local
</Proxy>

You could place this in your Apache configuration file, but instead, I created a site configuration to hold all of the related setup.

$ cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ape-test
<Proxy *>
        Allow from *.ape-test.local
</Proxy>

<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAlias *.ape.ape-test.local
        ServerAlias ape.ape-test.local

        ServerName ape-test.local
        DocumentRoot /home/zach/webapps/ape-test/public 

        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+.*$
        RewriteRule /?(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}:8080/?%{REMOTE_ADDR} [QSA,P]
</VirtualHost>

Everything else went swimmingly.