I'm sorry that I'm not sorry for resurrecting an old thread. ;-) My post intends to address a few things in this one, so I felt it was pertinent.
I recently started tinkering with nginx on my home computer; had been using Apache for eons. I cannot, for the life of me, get these "friendly" URLs working correctly.
I think this is what you are looking for:
https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/phpfcgi/
