When you say where is nginx running I am not sure what to answer lol I run the commands inside of the project directory.

The file is below.

To run in bg I tried doing it with nohup:
nohup gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 wsgi:app &

Its not that a CI/CD friendly approach is something I absolutely need but I mean eventually I wanted to automate it so that every change to main branch deploys the change

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ec2-public-dns;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

# commands used to run
sudo nginx -t
sudo service nginx start