---
canonical: "https://www.jsolly.com/blog/how-to-add-a-404-page-to-your-django-app/"
title: "Creating a Custom 404 Page in Django: A Step-by-Step Guide"
description: "Create a custom 404 page in Django: Follow this step-by-step guide with code examples to create an eye-catching 404 page."
author: "John Solly"
published: "2022-07-02T17:33:46.863Z"
updated: "2022-07-02T17:33:46.863Z"
---

<a id="creating-a-custom-404-page-in-django-a-step-by-step-guide"></a>

# Creating a Custom 404 Page in Django: A Step-by-Step Guide

![404 page with a scarecrow and and a 'back to homepage' button](https://d1d7p8ufhgz4ld.cloudfront.net/media/post_metaimgs/404_page.png)

I was watching an excellent LinkedIn learning course, [Advanced Django](https://www.linkedin.com/learning-login/share?account=42290089&forceAccount=false&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Flearning%2Fadvanced-django%3Ftrk%3Dshare_ent_url%26shareId%3DMLA9EnspTR23PH%252B%252BTGsVfA%253D%253D), when I came across an example where the author talked about setting up a 404 page. 

I implemented it on blogthedata.com with [this commit](https://github.com/jsolly/blogthedata/commit/f3364ac7eb3b2375ce1cf56f9de2a9c0b7c8838f). Go ahead, try it out!

https://blogthedata.com/doesnotexist

I first needed to adjust my views so that if a post/category was not found, it threw a 404 error instead of a 500.

<pre><code class="language-python"># views.py
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
def get_queryset(self):
        post = get_object_or_404(Post, slug=self.kwargs["slug"])</code></pre>

The second was to add a 404 handler to my view. This references a template containing all HTML shown when a 404 is thrown. I thought it would be fun to search '404 page' within public Github repositories, and I was not disappointed! I came across [this one](https://github.com/OnlyManu/404-not-found-master) which appears to be the result of a coding challenge where they were tasked to create a 404 page.

<pre><code class="language-python"># views.py
def handler_404(request, exception):
    return render(request, "blog/404_page.html")</code></pre>

Finally, add the handler to urls.py

<pre><code class="language-python"># urls.py
handler404 = "django_project.views.handler_404"</code></pre>

We now have a pretty 404 page instead of an ugly default page. If I want to go further, I could design templates and handlers for other types of errors, such as 500 (server error) and 403 (Not allowed). Perhaps I'll tackle that in the future!

July 2, 2022 in [Web Dev](https://www.jsolly.com/blog/category/web-dev/)

Updated July 2, 2022