Custom error pages with ASP.NET MVC 5

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So you created an ASP.NET application, hit a 404 Not Found error, and now you want to show something else other than the ugly default ASP.NET / IIS error pages, right? Well, sit back, because it’s rather annoying to setup properly. I strongly suggest reading the details that encouraged me to write this article. While that article definitely provides a majority of the setup required to make sure all cases and edge cases are handled when errors occur, there are some things that I had to do in order to make it all work properly.

Create a .html file and .aspx file for each error you want to handle. For example, 404.html and 404.aspx.

In the .aspx page, add this line below the “<%@ Page %>” directive where “xxx” is the error code you are handling such as 404 or 500.

<% Response.StatusCode = xxx; %>

In web.config, add this to your system.web section where each <error> section relates to whatever codes you are handling.

<customerrors mode="RemoteOnly" redirectmode="ResponseRewrite" defaultredirect="~/500.aspx">
    <error statuscode="404" redirect="~/404.aspx">
</error></customerrors>

In web.config add this to your system.webServer section where each <remove> and <error> section relates to whatever codes you are handling.

<httperrors errormode="DetailedLocalOnly">
    <remove statuscode="404">
    <error statuscode="404" path="404.html" responsemode="File">
</error></remove></httperrors>

Be sure to read through the originally linked blog to understand why you have to do certain things. I will say, however, that I had to fix a few things:

  • There was a missing semi-colon in the .aspx line for “Response.StatusCode”.