Using static files in custom 404/500 pages in Django

Question

I would like to use some custom CSS and images on my custom 404/500 pages that I made. Django doesn't include the STATIC_URL variable in those pages though.

What would be the best way to accomplish this? I also tried making a custom 404/500 view and rendering an arbitrary HTML file but it didn't work out so great.

Answer 1

Here's how I would do it:

# urls or settings
handler500 = 'mysite.views.server_error'

# views
from django.shortcuts import render

def server_error(request):
    # one of the things ‘render’ does is add ‘STATIC_URL’ to
    # the context, making it available from within the template.
    response = render(request, '500.html')
    response.status_code = 500
    return response

It's worth mentioning the reason Django doesn't do this by default:

“The default 500 view passes no variables to the 500.html template and is rendered with an empty Context to lessen the chance of additional errors.”

-- Adrian Holovaty, Django documentation