I have been wanting something like this for years, usually ending up with running the configs through some sketchy location block testers/validators and hacking together simplified setups so I can figure out why or how some nginx configurations are supposed to work. This is awesome, thanks a lot Julia!
I've always found it hard to get the Nginx config right and have at times done the following:
1. Run Nginx (or OpenResty in my case) in Docker
2. Have the config files in a volume
3. Have a script (Python, Bash or anything else) which watches the config files for changes, then first runs `nginx -s reload` in the Nginx container, and then executes a number of unit tests
For Emacs users there's also an nginx-mode which makes a bit more pleasant to edit the config files.
