Hi. I have the same issue and have spent some days trying to work out what is going wrong.

I have always used apache however this application needs to run on nginx.

(I would like to say that the Digital Ocean tutorials are exceptionally good!!!)

My Default file is as follows:

Default server configuration

server {
listen 80 defaultserver;
listen [::]:80 defaultserver;

    # SSL configuration
    #
    # listen 443 ssl default_server;
    # listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
    #
    # Note: You should disable gzip for SSL traffic.
    # See: https://bugs.debian.org/773332
    #
    # Read up on ssl_ciphers to ensure a secure configuration.
    # See: https://bugs.debian.org/765782


    root /var/www/html;

# root /usr/share/nginx/html;

    # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
    index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name 54.252.213.xxx;

    location / {
            # First attempt to serve request as file, then
            # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
            try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

location ~ .php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
}

location ~ /\.ht {
    deny all;
}


    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #
    #location ~ \.php$ {
    #       include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    #
    #       # With php7.0-cgi alone:
    #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    #       # With php7.0-fpm:
    #       fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
    #}

    # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
    # concurs with nginx's one
    #
    #location ~ /\.ht {
    #       deny all;
    #}

}

Virtual Host configuration for example.com

You can move that to a different file under sites-available/ and symlink that

to sites-enabled/ to enable it.

server {

listen 80;

I have tried varying combinations of this without luck. Have tried with SSL without.

I am obviously missing something here.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Thank you

You are missing most of the php configuration in your nginx conf file. This (taken from the end of step 4 in that tutorial) is what you should have in place. Be sure to have the Location / block which tells nginx to use php-fpm to process .php files.

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name server_domain_name_or_IP;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}