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:8080 ****"

nginx-stop.sh

nginx -s stop

nginx.conf.template

worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;

events {
  worker_connections  4096;
}
 
http {
  server { 
    listen       8080;
    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   nginx-access.log;
    error_log    nginx-error.log;

    location / {
      root    SOURCE_ROOT;
    }
  }
}

Could instead use the -p option
eg:
nginx -c $(pwd)/nginx.conf -g 'daemon off;' -p $(pwd)