How can I use i18n for my error pages in Rails 3?

Question

I need use the I18n api on my public/404.html page.

If I add to 404.html page:

<%= t('.page_were_looking') %>

I get an error message like:

Cannot use t('.page_were_looking') shortcut because path is not available

How can I use the I18n feature to this page?

Answer 1

Rails supports multilinguality by serving up error pages with a path like public/500.de.html, where de is the locale. It makes no sense, to use i18n for that case when Rails itself is fundamentally broken. If Rails is that much broken to get the right localized error file, it or probably the server will serve public/500.html.

This was introduced in Rails 2.3.¹

There is the solution to generate this static files with a rake task, before you deploy the app. Have a look on this gist.