I have been trying out Django on my mac, working through the Djanjo Book tutorial. One thing that puzzled me is that I was not seeing the promised “pretty error pages”. Django is supposed to show very informative, nicely formatted error messages. Not happening for me.

I eventually discovered that the problem has something to do with line endings. Since I was working on my mac, I saved my work with mac line endings. Django does not seem to like that. I flipped the line endings to unix style, and after that got the pretty error pages. They really are much nicer. It’s not that they look nicer, though they do; it’s that they are much more informative than the tracebacks I was seeing.