Django Rest Framework: Exception handler not working - django-rest-framework

Question

The Django Rest Framework exception handler doesn't seem to be working for me. ValidationErrors are getting turned into 500 responses.
When a ValidationError is raised, it doesn't get converted into a 400.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/handlers/exception.py", line 34, in inner
response = get_response(request)
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 115, in _get_response
response = self.process_exception_by_middleware(e, request)
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 113, in _get_response
response = wrapped_callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/views/generic/base.py", line 71, in view
return self.dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/django/views/generic/base.py", line 97, in dispatch
return handler(request, *args, **kwargs)
File "/example/app/views.py", line 25, in post
serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
File "/example/.local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/rest_framework/serializers.py", line 242, in is_valid
raise ValidationError(self.errors)
rest_framework.exceptions.ValidationError: {'email': [ErrorDetail(string='Enter a valid email address.', code='invalid')]}
[26/Feb/2020 20:44:54] "POST /login/ HTTP/1.1" 500 84465
In settings.py I have
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# ...
'rest_framework',
]
But I get the same behavior whether I have rest_framework in my INSTALLED_APPS or not.
Adding this to settings.py has no effect either:
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
'EXCEPTION_HANDLER': 'bla',
}
Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

It turns out it depends on the view you're sub-classing while throwing the exception.
I was subclassing View, which did not work:
from rest_framework import views
from rest_framework.exceptions import ValidationError
class LoginView(views.View):
def post(self, request):
raise ValidationError()
Switching to using GenericAPIView fixed my issue:
from rest_framework import generics
from rest_framework.exceptions import ValidationError
class LoginView(generics.GenericAPIView):
def post(self, request):
raise ValidationError()