One of the weirdities that I have on my personal server is that my public facing site – www.gauntletwizard.net – is served from my personal `~/public-html/` folder. PHP is disabled from these folders by default, for good reason, but that reason is to keep PHP out of the hands of randos and I’m careful about who’s on my machine.
Anyway – There’s a stanza in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php-[7].conf that begins with `Running PHP scripts in user directories is disabled by default` – Do as it says and comment that section out.