Nginx downloading php content instead of serving - php

Question

I have a ubuntu server at digitalocean where I am trying to get php to work.
I have successfully created a subdomain with nginx, though nginx keeps downloading the php files, instead of serving them. This is my default:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
index index.html index.php;
server_name _;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}
}
I have tried to add following to the default nginx file, with no luck:
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
}
in completion:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
index index.html index.php;
server_name _;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
}
}
I am starting to think that "location / {" is targeting every content, or is there a misconfiguration somewhere? It works perfectly fine if I add html files to the subdomain, then Nginx serves them correctly, but not php.
My conf file for nginx looks like this:
server {
listen 80;
index index.php index.html;
server_name sub.example.com;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
root /home/simonduun/sub;
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass app:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
}
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
gzip_static on;
}
location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
expires max;
log_not_found off;
}
location = /favicon.ico {
log_not_found off;
access_log off;
}
location = /robots.txt {
allow all;
log_not_found off;
access_log off;
}
location ~ ^/wp-json/ {
rewrite ^/wp-json/(.*?)$ /?rest_route=/$1 last;
}
}