nginx works very similarly to how Apache works on Debian systems. There are two folders inside of /etc/nginix
/etc/nginx
The two folders are sites-enabled and sites-available. The way you make it work is to write a Virtual host config
inside of sites-available, then make a symbolic link using ln -s to sites-enabled, once this is done you can restart nginix and that virutal host config will be loaded. The server will only read configs that are in sites-enabled. You can use this for hosting multiple different virtual hosts however if you just want to run a single website leave the default virtual host enabled and work with that.
The default config should look something like:
server {
listen 80 default;
server_name localhost;
access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
location / {
root /var/www/nginx-default;
index index.html index.htm;
}
Which will be in a file called /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.
All that config is doing is telling nginix to listen on port 80, write to the access log defined there.Its document root is in /var/www/nginx-default.
Lets say you put some html file in /var/www/nginx-default/foo.html, you would be able to access that file through going to your yourip/foo.html
Here is a good guide on how to setup nginx with PHP