Most real-world Web applications will want a bunch of additional PHP modules installed. If we wanted to install WordPress, for instance, we'd want the following laundry list of PHP extensions: ...

Here's a quick tutorial on how to setup Nginx with PHP support. The key? The installation of fastCGI, aka PHP-FPM, so Nginx can serve PHP files to clients.

Whatever installation method you use, you should have the CGI version of PHP installed, because some of the command-line tools included with APD are written in PHP and need the parser to run.