I currently have an established website running on Wordpress using nginx as the web server. The site is installed in a directory structure like so:

/srv/
    www.example.com/
        public/
            index.php # this is Wordpress's index.php file
            wp-content/
            wp-admin/
            wp-includes/

We now want to add additional functionality to the website which requires custom code. I want to install Laravel so that it's accessed with the /api/ directory, for example: www.example.com/api Laravel would take over. Now, before you say "why don't you just use a subdomain like api.example.com, we're currently doing this but running into same-origin policy issues with ajax.

If I install Laravel to /srv/www.example.com/public and rename the public folder included with Laravel to api/, I run into the issue of exposing the core of Laravel to the outside.