This minimal setup allows you to run nginx using the current folder as the doc-root. NOTE: python's simplehttpserver may be good enough for you. This is just a nice simple nginx setup.

README.md

1. Get all of these files into the target folder
2. Run the following commands:

chmod +x *.sh
./nginx-start.sh

nginx-start.sh

#!/bin/sh

sed "s|SOURCE_ROOT|$(pwd)|" nginx.conf.template > nginx.conf
nginx -c $(pwd)/nginx.conf
echo "**** Access running server at http://localhost:[PORT] ****"

nginx-stop.sh

nginx -s stop

nginx.conf.template

daemon off;

worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;

events {
  worker_connections  4096;
}

http {
  server {
    listen       4000;
    server_name  localhost;

    include       /usr/local/etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;

    access_log /dev/stdout;
    error_log /dev/stdout info;

    location / {
      root    SOURCE_ROOT/_site;
    }
  }
}