>>11499
Pretty sure nginx keeps access logs by default. Not sure if there's any rotation involved, though, that is, if old logs get rewritten, put into separate files or if you just have one monolithic beast. You likely won't be seeing enough traffic to cause a storage issue, so that's something.
If he's not really the kind of guy to do any favors and all you want are total download numbers in the absolute bare-bones bottom-of-the-barrel minimal-effort automated solution, maybe a daily cronjob that automatically updates a web-accessible text file produced by grepping the access logs, looking for a count of lines with BlackFogZine01.pdf in them. Would be a few minutes of effort tops, if even that.
If not, or if there's the slightest chance you might want even slightly more in the not-too-distant future, just ask him up front what you'd like and what he'd be willing to do.
Also, probably not a good idea to have page errors report anything about the backend. Seeing both the platform and version number makes it very convenient for both people and bots to abuse known exploits, should he forget to update. I don't think nginx 1.10.3 has any arbitrary code execution bugs, but you never know when things get left unmaintained for a while.
