I do not like having to use sudo to run development servers for testing web applications. sudo should be reserved for commands that really need that level of privilege. After installing passenger and nginx on Mac OS X Snow Leopard I had trouble getting nginx to run without sudo.

NB: sudo runs the command with superuser privileges ie things that could break your system if you do not know what you are doing, or typo a command so should be used sparingly.

if you have been running with sudo stop the service

$ sudo nginx -s stop

find and remove the log files for me this is:

$ rm -rf ~/bin/nginx/logs/*

Assuming nginx is on your path (if not you must know its location) to find its location you can try which ie:

$ which nginx

A few changes to the default config file:

vim ~/bin/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

#user morgy; #<-- comment out when running as user process
worker_processes  1;

http {
   passenger_root /path/ruby-ee-1.8.7/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.11;
   passenger_ruby /path/ruby-ee-1.8.7/bin/ruby;

   include       mime.types;
   default_type  application/octet-stream;

   client_max_body_size 20M;

   server {
      listen       8080; #<-- superuser only has acess to 80
      server_name  localhost, www.localhost;
      passenger_enabled on;
      root /your/path/public;   # <--- be sure to point to 'public'!
   }
}

That is all I had to do to get nginx working without sudo

$ nginx
$ nginx -s reload

Just point your browser to localhost:8080 or 127.0.0.1:8080