In some cases, you may wish to return a 404 (HTTP_NOT_FOUND) or other non-200 result from your handler. There is a trick here. if you return HTTP_NOT_FOUND from your handler, Apache will handle rendering an error page. This can be problematic if you wish your handler to render it's own error page.
In this case, you need to set req.status = apache.HTTP_NOT_FOUND,
render your page, and then return(apache.OK):
from mod_python import apache def handler(req): if req.filename[-17:] == 'apache-error.html': # make Apache report an error and render the error page return(apache.HTTP_NOT_FOUND) if req.filename[-18:] == 'handler-error.html': # use our own error page req.status = apache.HTTP_NOT_FOUND pagebuffer = 'Page not here. Page left, not know where gone.' else: # use the contents of a file pagebuffer = open(req.filename, 'r').read() # fall through from the latter two above req.write(pagebuffer) return(apache.OK)