Nginx still try to open default error log file even though I set nginx config file while reloading

This is old... but I went through the same pain and here is my solution.

As you can see the log is an alert, not a blocking error:

nginx: [alert] could not open error log file: open() "/var/log/nginx/error.log" failed (13: Permission denied)

It shouldn't be a problem :) Nginx just likes to check that file on startup...

Just use -p option. Something like this to launch Nginx locally works for me:

nginx -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf -g 'daemon off;' -p /home/Foo/log/nginx

You might need to fire it with sudo

sudo nginx -t