Create a default error page with Laravel

Defining a custom page for HTTP errors is pretty easy with Laravel:

Laravel makes it easy to display custom error pages for various HTTP status codes. For example, if you wish to customize the error page for 404 HTTP status codes, create a resources/views/errors/404.blade.php.

However, this requires to create a Blade file for each HTTP status you want to handle. An ideal solution would be to create a default view to display a generic error page for unhandled HTTP error codes.

First, create a resources/views/errors/default.blade.php file with the content you want to warn your users about an unhandled exception. Now, we need to edit the exception handler in app/Exceptions/Handler.php.

Internally, the exception handler uses the renderHttpException() method to convert a HTTP exception to a response. You can see it checks if a view exists for the status code with the following expression:

view()->exists($view = "errors::{$status}")

Then, if there is no corresponding view, Laravel will show its default view for the exception. What we want now is to act before the code of the renderHttpException() method is executed, so we can check by ourselves if there is no corresponding view and then use our own default view instead of the one provided by Laravel.

Copy the declaration of the renderHttpException() method in your exception handler:

/**
 * Render the given HttpException.
 *
 * @param  \Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpException  $e
 * @return \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response
 */
protected function renderHttpException(HttpException $e)
{
    return parent::renderHttpException($e);
}

Remember to import the HttpException class with use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpException at the top of the file.

Now, we need to check the existence of a view for the exception status code. If there is no corresponding view, we return a response with the default.blade.php view:

/**
 * Render the given HttpException.
 *
 * @param  \Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\HttpException  $e
 * @return \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response
 */
protected function renderHttpException(HttpException $e)
{
    if (! view()->exists("errors.{$e->getStatusCode()}")) {
        return response()->view('errors.default', ['exception' => $e], 500, $e->getHeaders());
    }

    return parent::renderHttpException($e);
}

And that's it! You may have noticed that we were only talking about HTTP exceptions since the beginning of this article, however Laravel will automatically convert other exceptions to HTTP exceptions (with a 500 status code), thus all exceptions will be handled by your default view. 😉

If you would like to see Laravel support for default error pages right out of the box, you can add a reaction 👍 to my pull-request.

One last thing since we were talking about error handling in this article. Note that, since Laravel 5.5.5, you can use the Route::fallback() method to display advanced 404 error pages (and you will have access to sessions, cookies, etc…).