One need to have gcc installed for that you need to install xcode along with command line tools. To install the same one can refer to this link for xcode 5.0.1.
Nginx requires PCRE – Perl Compatible Regular Expressions to build, I used PCRE version 8.33
Install PCRE
$ mkdir source
$ cd source
$ curl -OL ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-8.33.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf pcre-8.33.tar.gz
$ cd pcre-8.33/
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
Install nginx
Here I am considering stable version for installation.
$ cd ..
$ curl -OL http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.4.4.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf nginx-1.4.4.tar.gz
$ cd nginx-1.4.4
$ ./configure --with-http_ssl_module --with-pcre=../pcre-8.33
# When you are done with ./configure command you will see below output at the end you might want to keep this information copied some where for future reference.
$ make
$ sudo make install
Output–
nginx path prefix: "/usr/local/nginx"
nginx binary file: "/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx"
nginx configuration prefix: "/usr/local/nginx/conf"
nginx configuration file: "/usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf"
nginx pid file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/nginx.pid"
nginx error log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/error.log"
nginx http access log file: "/usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log"
nginx http client request body temporary files: "client_body_temp"
nginx http proxy temporary files: "proxy_temp"
nginx http fastcgi temporary files: "fastcgi_temp"
nginx http uwsgi temporary files: "uwsgi_temp"
nginx http scgi temporary files: "scgi_temp"
Start/Stop nginx
# Start
$ sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx
# Stop
$ sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop
For more details on command line help refer you
can make your life easier to access ngnix from anywhere by adding nginx path /usr/local/nginx/sbin into PATH environment variable inside ~/.profile file.