Django has built-in default views which are used automatically when exceptions such as PermissionDenied, Http404, SuspiciousOperation, etc. are raised. This is a convenient feature of Django which I love, but it seems to have a limitation.
I am raising an exception with a message: raise PermissionDenied('You are not an xyz and have no access to foobar')
Is there a context variable containing the original exception instance available in the templates (i.e. 403.html) called by the original error handlers so that I can access the message?
If not, is it possible to get a hold of the original exception with a custom handler (settings.handler403, etc.) so I can inject it into the context?
NOTE: I believe I can create a custom middleware with process_exception, but I would like to avoid this if possible since my guess is I would be duplicating a lot of existing Django logic and it's cleaner to reuse it. Also, it looks like a custom process_exception would override the logging in django.core.handlers.base amongst other behaviors. Re-implementing all that just for the sake of injecting exception info into an error template seemed kind of silly.
This feature has been implemented as ticket 24733.
In Django 1.9 and later, the exception will be passed to the error handlers.