I faced similar issue in my local (EASYPHP) with Elgg 3.1.1. Though Elgg 3.1.1 works fine on my Nginx Debian setup.
For Local I used Elgg 3.0.6 and it worked fine. May be you can try that version for now and see how it goes
Hello
Check the requirements for Elgg 3.
I fixed a similar issue after using PHP 7.1+
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