Best practice for intercepting error responses in Django and DRF

Using Django Mystery Errors
1

I have a Django app that uses the Django Rest Framework. Errors may occur on the Django side, like integrity errors in the database. The default error response will be something like:

{
  "details": {
    "email": "user with this email already exists."
  }
}

Validation errors may also occur DRF side:

{
  "detail": ...
}

As you can see, there is an inconsistency in the response message, as Django uses “details” and DRF uses “detail”.

However, I like neither format. I want to respond with a message in the following format:

{
  "message": ...
  "code": ...
}

My question is:

What is the best practice to handle both Django and DRF exceptions and respond with a custom response body?

I have tried:

  1. custom exception handler in DRF, but this only handles DRF exceptions
  2. custom error messages when defining models
      email = models.EmailField(error_messages={"required": {"message": "", "code": 123}})
    but Django can’t handle a dictionary as a message
  3. Adding a DRF validator to my serializer:
    email = serializers.EmailField(
    validators=[
        UniqueValidator(
            queryset=models.User.objects.all(),
            message={
                "message": "a user with this email already exists",
                "code": status.EMAIL_EXISTS,
            },
        )
    ],
)
    but this does not override the response body, but instead it embeds the message as an error message to the {"details": {"message": {<embedded dictionary>}}}

The only thing I believe would work, is to try-except all exceptions inside my Views, but I would like to know if there is a prettier way than placing all my View code inside a try block.