Custom Error Pages

Flask comes with a handy abort() function that aborts a request with an HTTP error code early. It will also provide a plain black and white error page for you with a basic description, but nothing fancy.

Depending on the error code it is less or more likely for the user to actually see such an error.

Common Error Codes

The following error codes are some that are often displayed to the user, even if the application behaves correctly:

404 Not Found

The good old “chap, you made a mistake typing that URL” message. So common that even novices to the internet know that 404 means: damn, the thing I was looking for is not there. It’s a very good idea to make sure there is actually something useful on a 404 page, at least a link back to the index.

403 Forbidden

If you have some kind of access control on your website, you will have to send a 403 code for disallowed resources. So make sure the user is not lost when they try to access a forbidden resource.

410 Gone

Did you know that there the “404 Not Found” has a brother named “410 Gone”? Few people actually implement that, but the idea is that resources that previously existed and got deleted answer with 410 instead of 404. If you are not deleting documents permanently from the database but just mark them as deleted, do the user a favour and use the 410 code instead and display a message that what they were looking for was deleted for all eternity.

500 Internal Server Error

Usually happens on programming errors or if the server is overloaded. A terrible good idea to have a nice page there, because your application will fail sooner or later (see also: Logging Application Errors).

Error Handlers

An error handler is a function, just like a view function, but it is called when an error happens and is passed that error. The error is most likely a HTTPException, but in one case it can be a different error: a handler for internal server errors will be passed other exception instances as well if they are uncaught.

An error handler is registered with the errorhandler() decorator and the error code of the exception. Keep in mind that Flask will not set the error code for you, so make sure to also provide the HTTP status code when returning a response.

Here an example implementation for a “404 Page Not Found” exception:

from flask import render_template

@app.errorhandler(404)
def page_not_found(e):
    return render_template('404.html'), 404

An example template might be this:

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block title %}Page Not Found{% endblock %}
{% block body %}
  <h1>Page Not Found</h1>
  <p>What you were looking for is just not there.
  <p><a href="{{ url_for('index') }}">go somewhere nice</a>
{% endblock %}