Getting PHP to work in subfolders with nginx

If you have nginx as your reverse proxy of choice (like I do) and you for one reason or the other have to run PHP code on your website, you might have a configuration in your nginx config file like this:

location ~ \.php$ {
    include /etc/nginx/snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    # or php7.x if you use old versions of PHP
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock; 
}

which works nice and dandy as long as your PHP code is not in a subfolder. But that occurs fairly often, and when it happens, the .php file won’t get passed to php-fpm and thus only displays as a text file. Not nice. To correct this, you can just have another similar block nested inside the subfolder config block, like this:

location ~ /subfolder/ {
    root /folderroot;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include /etc/nginx/snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
        # or php7.x if you use old versions of PHP
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
    }
}

and that should make PHP work in these subfolders too, because php-fpm will correctly pick up those requests. How delightful (or not, depending on your stance towards PHP).