I've split up my FPM pools so that php will run under each individual user and set the routing correctly in my vhost.conf files to pass the proper port number.

But I must have something incorrect in my environment because on this new domain I set up, require, require_once, include, include_once do not function, or rather, they may not be getting passed up to the interpreter to be rendered as php.

Since I already have a Wordpress install on this server that runs perfectly, I'm pretty sure the error is in my server block for nginx.

server {
    server_name  www.domain.com;
    rewrite ^(.*) http://domain.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  domain.com;
    client_max_body_size 500M;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    root   /home/username/public_html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ index.php;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?name=$1 break;
        }
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9002;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny  all;
    }
}

The problem I'm finding I think is that there are dynamic calls to the doc root index file, while all calls to anything within a sub-folder should be routed as normal ie: NOT passed to index.php.

I can't seem to find the right mix here.

It should run like so:

domain.com/cindy (file doesn't exist) --> index.php?name=$1
domain.com/admin/anyfile.php (files DO exist) --> admin/anyfile.php?$args