Here's how errors should be handled from my point of view:

Are all these cases covered? Would be good to have some tests mocking some errors to make sure we do

we need to add try catch blocks in some of the helpers.py functions

For example for check_access as we have situation where c.user is throwing an AttributeError coming from extension

Currently im testing few extensions against 2.8 and there are few scenarios where error handler is not working as it should.

First example is by enabling of ckanext-pages extension and when the instance is starting, the following error is occurring
This error is result of the home blueprint endpoint and plugin is looking for pylons c.action attribute instead

Second example is by enabling ckanext-ldap extension and the error stack is here
In this case, while trying to display error page, check_access in helpers.py is trying to get c.user but because the extension had failed, user is not set

@amercader ^^

OK, I had a closer look at this, here are some points to help clarify the situation:

• When running with debug=True, general uncaught exceptions should not be handled by Flask/Pylons. They should be allowed to raise so they can be picked up by the interactive debugger. By interactive debugger I mean this:

  • Pylons
    

  • Flask
    

• For Flask requests, I wrongly assumed that FlaskDebugToolbar was the responsible for showing the interactive debbuger, but it isn't. This is generated by Werkzeug, but only if running on Werkzeug of course! When running under paster and serving a Flask request the exception won't get handled and we will see a plain server error page like the cases @tino097 mentions in his comment:

  

I think this is fine until we get finish #4291 and switch to run the local development server with Werkzeug, thus enabling the debugger for Flask requests.

• To cover the Return 500 status code + Return JSON error object showing "Internal Server Error" (no error details) on API calls you will need something like this:

diff --git a/ckan/views/api.py b/ckan/views/api.py
index 8873f74..e3f776c 100644
--- a/ckan/views/api.py
+++ b/ckan/views/api.py
@@ -336,6 +336,13 @@ def action(logic_function, ver=API_DEFAULT_VERSION):
                       str(e)}
        return_dict[u'success'] = False
        return _finish(500, return_dict, content_type=u'json')
+    except Exception as e:
+        return_dict[u'error'] = {
+            u'__type': u'Internal Server Error',
+            u'message': u'Internal Server Error'}
+        return_dict[u'success'] = False
+        log.exception(e)
+        return _finish(500, return_dict, content_type=u'json')

    return _finish_ok(return_dict)