Handling 404 and other HTTP errors in Laravel 5
This blog post was originally published a little while ago. Please consider that it may no longer be relevant or even accurate.
In Laravel 4, it was a little bit tricky to handle all the possible 404 cases in the app and return a nice customised error page. Thankfully Laravel 5 makes it a lot easier to return a specific view for any HTTP error.
If you take a look at app/Exceptions/Handler in the development branch of Laravel 5, you'll spot this code handling the response to an exception.
This handly little bit of code leverages this HTTP handling in the framework which simply checks to see if the exception is a HTTP exception, and then if the corresponding view exists in the errors view folder. If the view does exist it returns it with the correct HTTP status.
So, to handle a 404 with your own error page, simply create the view errors/404.blade.php. Likewise, if you want to handle another sort of error you can just create a view with the appropriate HTTP status code. You may even notice that the framework ships with a 503.blade.php, which is used when you pop your app into maintenance mode with php artisan down.
