How to create a custom 404/500 error page in django

Add your own custom implementation of the following two views under views.py under your main content, and set the templates 404.html and 500.html and the content you want to display.

views.py¶

Code: 

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext


def handler404(request, *args, **argv):
    response = render_to_response('404.html', {},
                                  context_instance=RequestContext(request))
    response.status_code = 404
    return response


def handler500(request, *args, **argv):
    response = render_to_response('500.html', {},
                                  context_instance=RequestContext(request))
    response.status_code = 500
    return response

Handler404 and handler500 export the Django string configuration variable django/conf/urls/__init__.py. This is the reason for the above configuration.

To make the above configuration effective, you should define the following variables in the urls.py file, and point the exported Django variables to the string Python path that defines these Django functional views, as shown below:

urls.py¶

Add the following code in urls.py

from django.conf.urls import (
handler400, handler403, handler404, handler500
)

handler400 = 'my_app.views.bad_request'
handler403 = 'my_app.views.permission_denied'
handler404 = 'my_app.views.page_not_found'
handler500 = 'my_app.views.server_error'

Django 2.0 update

The signature of the handler view has been changed in Django 2.0: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/ref/views/#error-views

If you use the above view, handler404 will fail with the following message:

"Handler404() got an unexpected keyword parameter'exception'"

Modify your view in this case as follows:

def handler404(request, exception, template_name="404.html"):
    response = render_to_response("404.html")
    response.status_code = 404
    return response

Intractable diseases¶

Don't forget that DEBUG must be set to False to make these work, otherwise, the normal debug handler will be used.