Chapter 7. When the Wheels Fall Off: Understanding a Django Debug Page

Just about the last thing you want when your code is running in production is for it to encounter an error so severe that the only message that can be returned to the client is "We're sorry, the server has encountered an error, please try again later." During development, however, these server error situations are among the best of the bad outcomes. They generally indicate an exception has been raised, and when that happens there is a wealth of information available to figure out what has gone wrong. When DEBUG is on, this information is returned, in the form of a Django debug page, as the response to the request that caused the error. In this chapter, we will learn how to understand and make use of the information provided by a Django debug page.

Specifically, in this chapter we will:

• Continue development of the example survey application, making some typical mistakes along the way

• See how these mistakes manifest themselves...