Django gotcha: the urls.py needs to define the 404 view
Probably this is documented somewhere in the Django docs, but, I mean, who has time to read the docs? :-) In the urls.py file for my project I didn't do a
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
because that's just bad style. Instead I've just imported what I needed: patterns, include and url. Later on I got this error in my email:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/zope/djangoprojects/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Django-1.1.1-py2.5.egg/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 118, in get_response
callback, param_dict = resolver.resolve404()
File "/home/zope/djangoprojects/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Django-1.1.1-py2.5.egg/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 263, in resolve404
return self._resolve_special('404')
File "/home/zope/djangoprojects/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Django-1.1.1-py2.5.egg/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 255, in _resolve_special
callback = getattr(self.urlconf_module, 'handler%s' % view_type)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'handler404'
Just looking at the error I could determine the cause: my urlconf module (urls.py) didn't have a handler404 view defined, so I just gave up and replaced my specific imports with the asterisk import.
On a side note, what's up with Django logging? By default, the only way to log errors in production environments is by email. Really!? If I would want emails, I'd setup the syslog to email me those entries. I already have the logwatch emailing me stuff that happens on my server. One step above is django-db-log, which I haven't tried yet, but which seems to be logging errors to the db. Word is that real logging, using the logging python module, will be introduced in Django 1.2.