How can I run two standalone applications in one domain? - nginx

Question

I have two apps... wordpress and WHMCS (a billing app)
example.com is wordpress.
example.com/portal to be WHMCS.
On the nginx server here is how I have my folders
/example.com
|_ /wordpress
|_ /whmcs
root is wordpress, but when someone goes to /portal I want the root to be /whmcs instead.
I've tried both root and alias. I either get 404 or 403 forbidden.
Here is my current example.conf file
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl;
server_name example.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl.key;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers 'AES128+EECDH:AES128+EDH';
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
root /usr/share/nginx/example/wordpress;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ^~ /portal/index.php {
autoindex on;
alias /usr/share/nginx/example/portal;
}
}

Answer 1

The solution is not to share the php location.
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
root /usr/share/nginx/example;
location / {
root /usr/share/nginx/example/wordpress;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params; }
}
location /portal {
error_page 404 = #whmcs; }
location #whmcs {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /portal/index.php last;
root /usr/share/nginx/example/portal;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string; }
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params; }
}