Custom Django 404 error

This worked for me:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, urlfrom django.views.static import * from django.conf import settingsfrom django.conf.urls.defaults import handler404, handler500from app.views import errorurlpatterns = patterns('',    # Examples:    # url(r'^$', 'app.views.home', name='home'),)handler404 = error.error_handlerhandler500 = error.error_handler

You can make it do anything as you wish when going to that controller.

In addition to the previous answer, it is important to say that the views.py should return a HttpResponse with a 404 status in the http header. It is important to inform the search engines that the current page is a 404. Spammers sometimes creates lots of urls that could seem that would lead you to some place, but then serves you another content. They frequently make lots of different addresses serve you almost the exact same content. And because it is not user friendly, most SEO guide lines penalize that. So if you have lots of addresses showing the same pseudo-404 content, it could not look good to the crawling systems from the search websites. Because of that you want to make sure that the page you are serving as a custom 404 has a 404 status. So here it is a good way to go:

Into your application's urls.py add:

# Importsfrom django.conf.urls.static import staticfrom django.conf.urls import handler404from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, urlfrom yourapplication import views### Handles the URLS callsurlpatterns = patterns('',    # url(r'^$', include('app.homepage.urls')),)handler404 = views.error404

Into your application's views.py add:

# Importsfrom django.shortcuts import renderfrom django.http import HttpResponsefrom django.template import Context, loader### Handle 404 Errors# @param request WSGIRequest list with all HTTP Requestdef error404(request):    # 1. Load models for this view    #from idgsupply.models import My404Method    # 2. Generate Content for this view    template = loader.get_template('404.htm')    context = Context({        'message': 'All: %s' % request,        })    # 3. Return Template for this view + Data    return HttpResponse(content=template.render(context), content_type='text/html; charset=utf-8', status=404)

The secret is in the last line: status=404

Hope it helped!

I look forward to see the community inputs to this approach. =)

Basics:

To define custom view for handling 404 errors, define in the URL config, a view for handler404, like handler404 = 'views.error404'

Apart from the basics, some things to note about (custom 404 views):

1. It will be enabled only in Debug=False mode.

2. And more ignored one, across most answers (and this this stuck my brains out).

   The 404 view defaults to

   django.views.defaults.page_not_found(request, exception, template_name='404.html')

   Notice the parameter exception

   This was causing a 404 to 500 redirect from within def get_exception_response(self, request, resolver, status_code, exception) function defined in core.handlers.base since it could not find the parameter exception