how to make Nginx use home directory as root

Question

I have set up a local server on my laptop for web development and to check the website I'm working on I should have my code base in /var/www/example.domain which is not so convenient, I want Nginx to retrieve the files and parse PHP from my home directory, something like /home/projects/test-one/ but if I add this directory to root it'll throw me a 502 Bad Gateway error

here's my configuration:

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

    server_name _;

    location / {
            root /home/amirreza/Projects/escribir/;
            index index.php index.html index.htm;
    }
    location ~* \.php$ {
            fastcgi_index   index.php;
            fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
            include         fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, I'm on Debian 11

Answer 1

I was using fpm but my configuration didn't include it, so I changed my sites-available/default to this:

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

and also there was an issue with file permissions in my home folder, I changed it this way:

1- I added my user to www-data group using

sudo usermod -aG www-data amirreza

2- and then set the permissions of my code base to 664 (instead of 644) so that I can edit it as well:

-rw-rw-r--   1 amirreza www-data     22 دسامبر  16 13:19 index.php