Considering that nginx has no concept of a .htaccess file or per-directory configuration file (they kill performance) I'm not sure what you mean here. nginx it

Considering that nginx has no concept of a .htaccess file or per-directory configuration file (they kill performance) I'm not sure what you mean here. nginx itself reports clear and easy to understand errors on it's configuration files. If you simply want to test the config (without actually starting/restarting nginx), just pass it the '-t' flag; similar to apache's 'configtest' option.