nginx: 403 Forbidden & 301 Moved Permanently

I am trying to access example.com/api but when I do I'm getting "403 Forbidden" I'm able to access files in it such as example.com/api/v1.php in my browser, but when trying to access example.com/api/v1.php in my c++ project below ""301 Moved Permanently". How can I access the folder that is there?

Edit: I fixed the issue of not being able to access the "example.com/api" dir by adding index.php into the folder, but im still having an issue letting my c++ program seeing the "example.com/api/v1.php" page as said seeing it in browser works but in the program it prints "301 Moved Permanently"

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2022 04:20:08 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 162
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://example.com/api/v1.php
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies: master-only
Referrer-Policy: same-origin

<html>
<head><title>301 Moved Permanently</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>301 Moved Permanently</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>

This is my Vhost

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  {{ssl_certificate_key}}
  {{ssl_certificate}}
  server_name www.example.com;
  return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  {{ssl_certificate_key}}
  {{ssl_certificate}}
  server_name example.com www1.example.com;
  {{root}}

  {{nginx_access_log}}
  {{nginx_error_log}}

  if ($scheme != "https") {
    rewrite ^ https://$host$uri permanent;
  }

  location ~ /.well-known {
    auth_basic off;
    allow all;
  }

  {{settings}}

  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
  index index.php index.html;

  location ~ \.php$ {
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 3600;
    fastcgi_send_timeout 3600;
    fastcgi_param HTTPS $fastcgi_https;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:{{php_fpm_port}};
    fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE "{{php_settings}}";
  }

  location ~* ^.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|gz|svg|svgz|ttf|otf|woff|woff2|eot|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm|webp|zip|swf)$ {
    add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
    expires max;
    access_log off;
  }

  if (-f $request_filename) {
    break;
  }
}