Learn how to use the Django custom 404 error template page. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a custom page for page not found errors. And learn how to handle errors in Django with built-in views. Handler 404 is the built-in view. This will allow us to handle the 404 error using the custom template created by us.

Requirements :

pip install django

This command will install the latest Django package into your local machine.

Firstly Create a Django Project :

python -admin django startproject project

This command will create new project.

Navigate to Project folder :

cd project #projectname

This will change the current directory of the terminal to the project directory

Secondly Creating app with Demo app :

py manage.py startapp demo

Create a demo app for the Django project we have created.

Thirdly Create Urls.py in Demo app

from django.urls import path
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.home, name="home")
]

Here, We are creating the routing paths for the home view this will render out the Html page we have created for the model form. However the ” will represent the localhost path it will render the Html template as the homepage for the project on the localhost address. i.e. 127.0.0.1:8000.

Creating views in demo app :

from django.shortcuts import render

# Create your views here.

def home(request):
    return render(request, 'home.html')

def error_404(request, exception):
    return render(request, '404.html')

Here we are creating the 2 views home and error_404. The home view will return the home.html page. And the error_404 view will return our custom 404 page which is 404.html page.

Adding view handler to the main URLs : 

from django.conf.urls import handler404, handler500
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', include('demo.urls'))
]

handler404 = 'demo.views.error_404'

Here the built-in handler will be overridden with the view in the demo app which is error_404. Nothing but the default template of the 404 pages not found given by Django will be modified by the 404.html in our project. Get reference from Documentation

Change the Settings.py 

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = False
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['*']

Here we are changing the Settings.py file of the project we have created because. We have to change the DEBUG as False nothing but we are turning off the Django security to check the server. And again we need to modify the allowed host with ‘*’ because it allow the every host user to access the content and render the handlers properly on localhost.

404 HTML template

<html>

<body>
    <h1>Page not Found</h1>
</body>

</html>

And finally this the 404.html code you can modify the code as per your wish and you can add the styles and design to reflect more into the 404.html

When the user typed the address which was irrelevant to the project then it will start the render our custom template of 404. Hence this is how we can use the Django custom 404 error template page.

Output :

Output