Django transferring stylesheet with MIME type text/html on custom 404 page

Question

I'm designing a custom 404 page for my site which is built with Django, but I'm running into problems with the stylesheet associated with 404.html.

I set DEBUG = False in settings.py in order to see my custom 404 page, and added '*' to ALLOWED_HOSTS.

Then I changed urls.py with this line:

handler404 = 'site.views.custom_404'

In views.py:

def custom_404(request):
    return render_to_response("site/404.html", context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Now when I get the 404 page locally, I see my html that I wrote in 404.html, but the stylesheet, style.css, doesn't work. I get this message in the console:

Resource interpreted as Stylesheet but transferred with MIME type text/html:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/site/static/style.css

All the other pages on my site still have the proper style associated with style.css, except this new 404 page.

I tried adding this to settings.py, but nothing changed:

if DEBUG:
    import mimetypes
    mimetypes.add_type("text/css", ".css", True)

Answer 1

Have you defined your static files in settings.py ?

I'm guessing you have 'django.contrib.staticfiles', in your installed apps. you can define it like this :

import os.path

PROJECT_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

STATICFILES_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_ROOT, 'static'),
)

else in your url or settings do this :

custom_404 = "mysite.views.server_error"

and in views this :

from django.shortcuts import render

def server_error(request):
    # one of the things ‘render’ does is add ‘STATIC_URL’ to
    # the context, making it available from within the template.
    response = render(request, "404.html")
    response.status_code = 404
    return response