Don't render 404 yourself, there's no reason to; Rails has this functionality built in already. If you want to show a 404 page, create a render_404 method (or not_found as I called it) in ApplicationController like this: def not_found raise ActionController::RoutingError.new('Not Found') end Rails also handles AbstractController::ActionNotFound, and ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound the same way. This

