wagonerwebworks said:

My setup runs on CentOS 6 following a guide here: Install and configure Nginx, MySQL & PHP-FPM in CentOS 6

There is a section there for a laravel config block.

Thank you for the link! That was very useful since I'm probably going to use CentOS in the future for my web host :D

I finally found out what my problem was. It's been a while since I've touched a Laravel application so I'm a bit rusty. I was forgetting to do chmod -R o+w app/storage for my app to work with the web server. It worked when I did artisan serve but that a php development server so it's different.

The root is alright since this is my local machine and I never use the root of the web server. I only use a "userdir" sort of under /home/username/sites hence the following block from my nginx config:

# Userdir - php
       location ~ ^/~([^/]+)/(.+\.php)$ {
        if (!-f /home/$1/sites/$2) {
            rewrite ^ 404;
        }
        alias /home/$1/sites/$2;
	fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $request_filename;
}
 
# Userdir - static
location ~ ^/~([^/]+)(/.*)?$ {
             alias /home/$1/sites$2;
             autoindex on;
}

I bookmarked the site you posted for future reference. Thanks again.