Handling Custom Error Pages(404, 500) In Django

404 Page not found and 500 Internal server errors generally occur on every website. When these errors occur, generally for Django application it will load a page showing the application settings. So to avoid settings open, we’ll keep DEBUG=False in production mode. But keeping DEBUG=False by default the pages will be served by web servers like Nginx or apache which won’t look good for an end user point of view. So in order to display better looking UI to the end user, we’ll customize the Django’s built-in 404 and 500 pages.

By default, these error pages are handled by handlerxxx views. For example 404 errors will be served by handler404 view, similarly, 500 Internal server error will be handled by handler500. So in order to display our custom pages instead of web server’s pages, we will override the Django’s handlerxxx views.

In your views.py

def handler404(request):
    return render(request, '404.html', status=404)
def handler500(request):
    return render(request, '500.html', status=500)

Now just specify these in your urls.py as below.

handler404 = myapp.views.handler404
handler500 = myapp.views.handler500

In settings.py

You need to add your hostname in ALLOWED_HOSTS like:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['testsite.com', 'localhost']

With the above steps, we’ll get to see your own custom error pages served by Django’s views with better UI.

The article was originally published at MicroPyramid blog.