I’ve been getting into trouble for several hours with redirecting to the 404 page in Zend Framework 2.

Note: Zend Framework 2 has been deprecated. Zend Framework was migrated to the Laminas Project in 2020, where development continues today. The notFoundAction() technique below still applies in laminas-mvc.

I asked about this on Stack Overflow.

What Didn’t Work

Before that, I was using the following code:

$this->getResponse()->setStatusCode(404);
return;

This sets the HTTP status code to 404, which looks fine at first. But it only changes the response header; it doesn’t dispatch the error controller, so once I built a custom 404 page I found that it never rendered.

The Solution

To actually render the 404 error page, return notFoundAction() instead:

return $this->notFoundAction();

notFoundAction() is provided by AbstractActionController. It sets the 404 status and hands off to the configured error template, so your custom page is displayed.