Custom 404 page in CakePHP 3.X - cakephp

Question

I want to create one custom 404 page for all errors coming to the website for production environment. For example if I receive missing controller or view error then it will redirect to
http://example.com/404.html, Also in some cases I will deliberately redirect it http://example.com/404.html
Earlier in CakePHP 2.x it was done by adding following action in AppContoller.php
public function appError($error) {
$this->redirect('/page-not-found.html',301,false);
}
But It is not working in CakePHP 3.x, I want to replicate same behavior in CakePHP 3.x

Answer 1

Do not redirect
The correct action to take if a page should render a 404 is to render a 404.
Redirecting to another page is confusing for users, especially since many browsers cache 301 responses making the original url inaccessible. This also affects e.g. search engines as the static file 404.html will have a 200 response code (unless you modify your webserver config) so it'll say 404 but simply not be.
The blog tutorial, which all devs should do before starting a project, guides you in the right direction:
public function view($id)
{
$article = $this->Articles->get($id);
$this->set(compact('article'));
}
The table method get returns a single entity object or throws an exception:
If the get operation does not find any results a Cake\Datasource\Exception\RecordNotFoundException will be raised. You can either catch this exception yourself, or allow CakePHP to convert it into a 404 error.
The controller code in this example doesn't need to have any "what if it doesn't exist" handling because by default if the record doesn't exist the result is a 404.
Changing the 404 template
If you want to change the way the 404 or 500 pages look change the template files
For all 4xx and 5xx errors the template files error400.ctp and error500.ctp are used respectively.
The error template is in your application, note that in production mode the output is very minimal.

Answer 2

If the get operation does not find any results a Cake\Datasource\Exception\RecordNotFoundException will be raised. You can either catch this exception yourself, or allow CakePHP to convert it into a 404 error.

Answer 3

The simplest way can be just implemented in two steps,
Step 1:
turn the debug mode off in config/app.php
Step 2:
Replace the content of src/Template/Layout/error.ctp with your custom layout.