For a plain static site (a built blog, marketing page, or dist/ from a bundler), you just need root, index, and a try_files that returns a real 404 for missing files.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    root  /var/www/example.com;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

What each line does:

root /var/www/example.com; — the directory on disk. A request for /about/page.html serves /var/www/example.com/about/page.html.
index index.html; — what to serve when a directory is requested (/ → /index.html).
try_files $uri $uri/ =404; — try the exact file, then the directory (with its index), and if neither exists return a real 404 instead of an ugly default or an infinite loop.

Common additions:

Don’t serve dotfiles like .git or .env:

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known) {
        deny all;
    }

autoindex off; is the default — keep directory listings off unless you specifically want a file index.
For pretty URLs without the .html (e.g. /about → about.html), use:

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
    }

Add caching for assets (see the asset-cache recipe) and compression (the gzip recipe) on top of this.

sudo nginx -t && sudo nginx -s reload

Serve a static site