404 and 500 Customisation - Django

Originally written on 2020-01-02. DEV's displayed publication date reflects this archive migration.

Simple 3 Steps

1. add a folder templates under the root folder of your project; ideally it should be the same directory as your manage.py file
2. create 404.html and 500.html files in templates folder and customize however you please
3. go to settings.py change one little thing:

# assuming you haven't changed your BASE_DIR
# this is the default:
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)))

TEMPLATES = [{
    'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
}]

You have to make sure that the correct html files can be properly referred to. And that's is!!