Serving Laravel with an Nginx Server Block

Question

I'm trying to serve a new Laravel app with Nginx but when I navigate to my domain, all I get is a file called "download" which downloads automatically. No Laravel app is being served. Here's my server block:

server {
    server_name example.com;
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    server_name www.example.com;
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

    root /var/www/example.com/public;
    index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html index.php;
    location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

If I open the "download" file, it has the contents of public/index.php:

<?php

use Illuminate\Contracts\Http\Kernel;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

define('LARAVEL_START', microtime(true));

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Check If Application Is Under Maintenance
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| If the application is maintenance / demo mode via the "down" command we
| will require this file so that any prerendered template can be shown
| instead of starting the framework, which could cause an exception.
|
*/

if (file_exists(__DIR__.'/../storage/framework/maintenance.php')) {
    require __DIR__.'/../storage/framework/maintenance.php';
}

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Register The Auto Loader
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Composer provides a convenient, automatically generated class loader for
| this application. We just need to utilize it! We'll simply require it
| into the script here so we don't need to manually load our classes.
|
*/

require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Run The Application
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Once we have the application, we can handle the incoming request using
| the application's HTTP kernel. Then, we will send the response back
| to this client's browser, allowing them to enjoy our application.
|
*/

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

$kernel = $app->make(Kernel::class);

$response = tap($kernel->handle(
    $request = Request::capture()
))->send();

$kernel->terminate($request, $response);

Any suggestions on how to server Laravel with an Nginx server block?

Answer 1

After following Ivan Shatsky's, recommendations (adding PHP-FPM) and https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/deployment#nginx I was able to come up with a solution:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name example.com;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

    return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443;
    server_name www.example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com/public;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.php index.html;

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }

}

Thank you, Ivan.