Django, a powerful web framework for Python, has in-built functionality and design features that facilitate error handling. It has always got a standard way of handling errors, from HTTP errors to exceptions caused by coding errors.
For instance, Django has a rich logging system which involves error tracking (source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/logging/). If a problem arises, you have the detailed logs to investigate the cause of the errors. By customizing the logger’s setup, you can determine the type of logs you want to store and their corresponding levels such as DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and CRITICAL.
A common way to handle exceptions in Django is to use try and except blocks. This way, when the code inside the try block fails, it raises an exception that is then caught in the except block avoiding any crashes and allowing your application to handle the error gracefully (source: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/errors.html).
Middleware can also be used to handle exceptions in Django. Middleware is a set of hooks provided by Django that are processed before the request reaches the view and after the response is processed (source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/http/middleware/). You can create an exception middleware that will catch all unhandled exceptions and process them accordingly.
The Django configuration has a DEBUG mode, which when enabled, provides detailed error pages with information such as the stack trace, SQL queries executed and template variables (source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/settings/#debug). While this is useful for development, in a production setting, DEBUG should be set to False to avoid exposing sensitive information.
For HTTP errors such as 404 (page not found) or 500 (server error), Django allows you to create custom views to handle these errors. For example, you can create a 404.html template in your main templates directory, and Django will use this whenever a 404 error occurs (source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/http/views/#the-http404-exception).
Moreover, Django provides a database API that includes a range of exception classes such as ObjectDoesNotExist or MultipleObjectsReturned (source: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/db/models/#handling-exceptions). These are used to handle exceptions when interacting with the database.
There’s also a Django application called django-debug-toolbar (source: https://django-debug-toolbar.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) that allows you to debug your views and templates effortlessly, presenting all kinds of information about the request/responses.
Django’s robustness in error handling, thus, makes it not just an excellent framework for developers who are new to web development, but also scales to serve production-ready, enterprise-level web applications.
