If like me you are used to setting up your own hosting environment on Debian or a Debian derived distro than you'll probably be surprised to know that setting up the same stack on Arch Linux is just a tad different than what you're used to. For this reason I've put together this practical guide to get you up and running quickly.

Nginx

yay -S nginx

Note: the default path for your web content on Arch is /usr/share/nginx/html/.

Start Nginx on boot:
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

MariaDB

yay -S mariadb

Note: Before starting the MariaDB server you need to issue the following command:

mysql_install_db --user=mysql --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql
Importing a large database:
mysql -u {DB-USER-NAME} -p {DB-NAME} < {db.file.sql path}
Start MariaDB on boot:
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

PHP

yay -S php-fpm

In order for Nginx to handle PHP properly you need to tell it where to look for the php-fpm service.
In your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf add the following to the bottom of each location block.

include php.conf;

Since we pointed our nginx.conf to a /etc/nginx/php.conf configuration it's neccesary to create this file as well:

location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files $uri $document_root$fastcgi_script_name =404;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include fastcgi.conf;

    # prevention for httpoxy vulnerability: https://httpoxy.org/
    fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY "";
}
Start PHP-FPM on boot:
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service