apache does not pass request to Django (404 not found) - django

Question

I have a custom 404 page setup for the site, which works fine, like this:
when I hit mysite.com/fdsafsadfdsa which doesn't exist, the custom 404 page shows up.
However if I add a urlencoded '/' which is '%2f' at the end of url, mysite.com/fdsafsadfdsa%2f, and this gives me the apache 404 not found.
it looks like apache decided to handle this 404 itself instead of passing down to Django
Anybody has idea why this is happening?

Answer 1

Turns out it's a issue in Apache/Nginx. And somebody submit this issue to Django project before, see here: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15718
and quote from the ticket, there's a workaround:
After investigation I've found that the 2nd issue (404 error directly from apache) is not related to django and can be avoided by adding "AllowEncodedSlashes On" into apache config. Unfortunately apache replaces %2f with / itself, so the behavior is exactly the same as in simple http server provided by django. In Apache 2.2.18 (which is not released yet, i guess), AllowEncodedSlashes allows value NoDecode. With the value NoDecode, such URLs are accepted, but encoded slashes are not decoded but left in their encoded state. Meanwhile I'm using the workaround
request_uri = force_unicode(environ.get('REQUEST_URI', u'/'))
if u'?' in request_uri:
path_info,query = request_uri.split('?',1)
else:
path_info,query = request_uri,''
instead of original
path_info = force_unicode(environ.get('PATH_INFO', u'/'))
in core/handlers/wsgi.py