I went through a similar exercise with nginx + php-fpm a couple years ago. Nginx for FreePBX
Here’s where I pulled the .htaccess dirctives into the nginx config:
# disallows the things that the FreePBX .htaccess files disallow
location ~ (/\.ht|/\.git|\.ini$|/libraries|/helpers|/i18n|/node|/views/.+php$) {
deny all;
}
# from the api module .htaccess file
rewrite ^/admin/api/([^/]*)/([^/]*)/?(.*)?$ /admin/api/api.php?module=$1&command=$2&route=$3 last;
I think we could combine our notes into a couple “Apache Alternatives” articles for the wiki.