Django page not found - general

Question

What is the difference between Django's two options:

• return HttpRequestNotFound()

• raise Http404

?

Answer 1

• Returning HttpRequestNotFound means that the view takes care of presenting the 404 page and its HTML. You can use this if you want a view to present a different 404 error page than the default Django 404 page.
• Raising Http404 means Django will use the default 404 view that you've configured (by default this is django.views.defaults.page_not_found). This can be modified by specifying a different handler for 404 pages (see django.conf.urls.handler404).

For more details see Django's documentation on 404 error pages.