PHP MySQL Connection Error

I’ve been stuck for several days now and I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction. When I signed up for a droplet, I received an IP address. I SSH into that IP address, and once there I have installed nginx, php, and mysql without any issues. I’ve gone into mysql, created users, granted them privileges, flushed the privileges, etc. I can do the whole php.ini file thing and see the results in my browser. I have also created a small website (at /var/www/mywebsite) that has several php pages that I can access from my browser. The problem occurs when I go to a page on my website that has:

<php require_once(‘MY_private_database\db_connect.php’); ?>

The file db_connect.php has the following code in it:

<?php

$servername = “localhost”; $username = “myusername”; $password = “mypassword”; $dbname = “mydb”;

// Create connection $conn = mysqli_connect($servername, $username, $password, $dbname); // Check connection if (!$conn) { die("Connection failed: " . mysqli_connect_error()); }

?>

I am able to access MySQL from the command line using myusername and mypassword.

When I’m in my browser, and I go to the page that has the ‘require_once’ in it, I get a 500 error “This page isn’t working. {my ip address} is currently unable to handle this request.” I really need to be able to access my MySQL database from my website. Any suggestions on how I can fix this problem? Thank you.