Why Are My .php Files Downloading Instead of Executing in Nginx?

Nginx Configuration Issue: .php Files Served as Downloads Instead of Executed

When attempting to install an NGINX and PHP stack, a user encountered an issue where .php files were being served as downloads instead of being executed. Below is the solution to resolve this issue:

In /etc/nginx/sites-available/default:

• Uncomment both "listen" lines to enable Nginx to listen on both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Edit the "index" line to include "index.php" as the first index file.

Specific Edit Commands:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

# listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
listen 80; 

# listen for ipv6
listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; 

root /usr/share/nginx/www;

# Index files in order
index index.php index.html index.htm;

• Uncomment the "location ~ .php$" block to pass PHP scripts to the FastCGI server.

Additional Configuration Tips:

• Ensure "cgi.fix_pathinfo" is set to 0 in /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini.
• Restart Nginx and php5-fpm using the following commands:

sudo service nginx restart && sudo service php5-fpm restart

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