Responding with 404 as status code in Webapp2

Question

My app is dynamically generating pages by reading the URL. For example, it will handle all URLs formatted like this:

[url]/word

If /word is a valid URL then the app will generate a page and return it back. When the app can't find anything useful it should return a 404 page.

How can I do that? More specifically how do I set the status code to 404?

Answer 1

From within your RequestHandler, you can simply call self.abort(404) or webapp2.abort(404) to set the error status code.

References:

• webapp2.RequestHandler.abort():

  Raises an HTTPException.

  This stops code execution, leaving the HTTP exception to be handled by an exception handler.

  Parameters:

  code – HTTP status code (e.g., 404).
  args – Positional arguments to be passed to the exception class.
  kwargs – Keyword arguments to be passed to the exception class.
  

• webapp2.abort():

  Raises an HTTPException.

  Parameters:

  code – An integer that represents a valid HTTP status code.
  args – Positional arguments to instantiate the exception.
  kwargs – Keyword arguments to instantiate the exception.