How to customize Error Pages

When any exception is thrown in Symfony2, the exception is caught inside the Kernel class and eventually forwarded to a special controller, TwigBundle:Exception:show for handling. This controller, which lives inside the core TwigBundle, determines which error template to display and the status code that should be set for the given exception.

Error pages can be customized in two different ways, depending on how much control you need:

  1. Customize the error templates of the different error pages (explained below);
  2. Replace the default exception controller TwigBundle::Exception:show with your own controller and handle it however you want (see exception_controller in the Twig reference);

Tip

The customization of exception handling is actually much more powerful than what’s written here. An internal event, kernel.exception, is thrown which allows complete control over exception handling. For more information, see kernel.exception Event.

All of the error templates live inside TwigBundle. To override the templates, we simply rely on the standard method for overriding templates that live inside a bundle. For more information, see Overriding Bundle Templates.

For example, to override the default error template that’s shown to the end-user, create a new template located at app/Resources/TwigBundle/views/Exception/error.html.twig:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>An Error Occurred: {{ status_text }}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Oops! An Error Occurred</h1>
    <h2>The server returned a "{{ status_code }} {{ status_text }}".</h2>
</body>
</html>

Tip

If you’re not familiar with Twig, don’t worry. Twig is a simple, powerful and optional templating engine that integrates with Symfony2. For more information about Twig see Creating and using Templates.

In addition to the standard HTML error page, Symfony provides a default error page for many of the most common response formats, including JSON (error.json.twig), XML, (error.xml.twig), and even Javascript (error.js.twig), to name a few. To override any of these templates, just create a new file with the same name in the app/Resources/TwigBundle/views/Exception directory. This is the standard way of overriding any template that lives inside a bundle.

Customizing the 404 Page and other Error Pages

You can also customize specific error templates according to the HTTP status code. For instance, create a app/Resources/TwigBundle/views/Exception/error404.html.twig template to display a special page for 404 (page not found) errors.

Symfony uses the following algorithm to determine which template to use:

  • First, it looks for a template for the given format and status code (like error404.json.twig);
  • If it does not exist, it looks for a template for the given format (like error.json.twig);
  • If it does not exist, it falls back to the HTML template (like error.html.twig).

Tip

To see the full list of default error templates, see the Resources/views/Exception directory of the TwigBundle. In a standard Symfony2 installation, the TwigBundle can be found at vendor/symfony/src/Symfony/Bundle/TwigBundle. Often, the easiest way to customize an error page is to copy it from the TwigBundle into app/Resources/TwigBundle/views/Exception and then modify it.

Note

The debug-friendly exception pages shown to the developer can even be customized in the same way by creating templates such as exception.html.twig for the standard HTML exception page or exception.json.twig for the JSON exception page.