How to configure Apache to use custom error pages

Learn how to set up custom error pages in Apache. The Apache web server provides a default set of generic error pages for 404, 500, and other common Apache errors.

However, creating custom error pages allows you to:

Continue your branding on these pages
Integrate their design into the look and feel of your website
Direct lost visitors to their intended destinations
Provide error pages in languages other than English

Contents

Requirements
Create the custom error page
Configure Apache to use the custom error page
Other HTTP error codes

Requirements

Cloud Server running Linux (CentOS 7 or Ubuntu 14.04)
Apache installed and running

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SSL certificate

Create the custom error page

First, you will need to create the custom error page. For testing purposes, we will create an example error page to handle 404 errors.

Use SSH to connect to your server and go to your website's document root. Create a new page named my-404.html with the command:

sudo nano my-404.html

Put the following into this file:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Custom 404 Error Page</title>
</head>

<body>
<p>Whoops, page not found! Sorry about that.</p>

</body>
</html>

Save and exit the file.

You can view the file by going to "http://example.com/my-404.html" to make sure it is displaying correctly.

Configure Apache to use the custom error page

To tell Apache to use a custom error page, you will need to add an ErrorDocument directive. The syntax for this directive is:

ErrorDocument 404 [path to file]

For this example, since the my-404.html file is in the site's document root, we will be adding the directive:

ErrorDocument 404 /my-404.html

This directive needs to go inside the VirtualHost command block in the site's main Apache configuration file.

By common convention, this Apache configuration file is usually:

CentOS 7/etc/httpd/conf.d/example.com.conf
Ubuntu 14.04/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

Note

The location and filename of a site's Apache configuration file can vary based on how you or your server administrator has set up hosting.

Edit this file with your editor of choice, for example with the command:

CentOS 7sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/example.com.conf
Ubuntu 14.04sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

Scroll through the file until you find the VirtualHost command block, which will look like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
    <Directory "/var/www/example.com/html">
    AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Add the ErrorDocument to the VirtualHost command block, but be sure to put it outside any Directory command blocks. For example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
ErrorDocument 404 /my-404.html
    <Directory "/var/www/example.com/html">
    AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Save and exit the file, then restart Apache for the changes to take effect: