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.
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.”
I run into the same problem and found a solution which doesn't need custom templates or handlers. From Django 1.4 on you can use the tags get_media_prefix and get_static_prefix to access MEDIA_URL and STATIC_URL when they are not in the context.
In my particular case (Django 1.5), I wanted to access some static images in my page 500.html. I just added at the beginning of the template
{% load static %}
and then obtained the media and static urls with these tags
<img src="{% get_media_prefix %}logo.png">
<img src="{% get_static_prefix %}img/error_pages/error.png" style="height:235px;">
You can find the official documentation here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/templates/builtins/#get-static-prefix
I believe you're just going to have to override the default 404/500 error handling. This should get you started:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/views/#customizing-error-views
