How to display the message passed to Http404 in a custom 404 Error template in Django?

Question

I have a project that I am working on in django. There are a lot of instances where I:

raise Http404("this is an error")

and it creates a nice 404 page for me with the error message "this is an error" written on it.

I now want to create a custom error page and have it still display the message, but I can't figure out how.

I'm sure it's just a template variable that I need to add to my custom 404 template, but I can't find any documentation for it.

Answer 1

As of Django 1.9, the exception is passed to the page_not_found view which runs when you raise Http404. A representation of the error is passed to the template, you can include it in your template with:

{{ exception }}

In earlier versions, the exception was not passed to the page_not_found view, so there wasn't an easy way to include the message from the exception in the template.

One possibility was to use the messages framework as @Euribates suggests in their answer. Another was to render a template and return a 404 status code in your view, instead of raising Http404.