Using static files in custom 404/500 pages in Django

Here's how I would do it:

# urls or settings
handler500 = 'mysite.views.server_error'

# views
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, '500.html')
    response.status_code = 500
    return response

It's worth mentioning the reason Django doesn't do this by default:

“The default 500 view passes no variables to the 500.html template and is rendered with an empty Context to lessen the chance of additional errors.”

-- Adrian Holovaty, Django documentation

I run into the same problem and found a solution which doesn't need custom templates or handlers. From Django 1.4 on you can use the tags get_media_prefix and get_static_prefix to access MEDIA_URL and STATIC_URL when they are not in the context.

In my particular case (Django 1.5), I wanted to access some static images in my page 500.html. I just added at the beginning of the template

{% load static %} 

and then obtained the media and static urls with these tags

<img src="{% get_media_prefix %}logo.png">
<img src="{% get_static_prefix %}img/error_pages/error.png" style="height:235px;">

You can find the official documentation here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/ref/templates/builtins/#get-static-prefix