Constant exception.Craft\HttpException.404 in logs

Question

My log is getting hammered nonstop by the same error about every second (see image). Any idea what's going on here?

Text is:

Level       error
Category    exception.Craft\HttpException.404
Message     Craft\HttpException in /home/folder/public_html/craft/app/controllers/TemplatesController.php:72

Answer 1

You can try installing the Retour plugin to get a log of all of the 404 errors and their referrers, and potentially handle them via redirects.

Answer 2

The Error is thrown here

public function actionRender($template, array $variables = array())
{
    // Does that template exist?
    if (craft()->templates->doesTemplateExist($template))
    {
        $this->renderTemplate($template, $variables);
    }
    else
    {
        throw new HttpException(404);
    }
}

Maybe you are trying to render a template that does not exist? Are you not in dev mode and don't have a homepage template so it tries to redirect again and again? Or maybe the same issue with an error template? Do you have a {% redirect %} in your templates?

Edit: or maybe you deleted some files? You could output the $template variable in the controller in order to see which template causes the error

Answer 3

A 404 is just someone/something requesting a resources (path, image, JS file, CSS file, etc.) that your web server and Craft cannot resolve on your site.

If this is on a publicly facing website, there's about a 99.99% chance it's just some script/bot probing different URLs for various endpoints to execute known exploits. It's extremely common on any public facing website.

If you look in your actual craft/storage/runtime/logs files instead of the log viewer in the Control Panel, you'll see the same 404's being logged along with the REQUEST_URI. That will show the non-existent path/resource that was requested.