Nginx location ~ /\.ht

location ~ /\.ht {
    deny all;
}

This directive tells the webserver to deny all incoming requests for any files starting with .ht in the root directory (/).

The tilde ~ tells nginx to use regular expressions.

Thus, files like .htaccess, .htpasswd, etc, will not be served.

Note: The backslash (\) before the dot, is just to escape the dot (the dot that comes before htaccess, htpassword, etc.

Say your website is example.com. The particular location will be example.com/.ht. So the deny all directive will deny all requests to example.com/.ht*. (* indicate any following string)

~ say nginx to go for regular expression based matching. / is root directory of your website. \ is escape character. It says to interpret . literally and not as a part of regular expression.