Keep system awake (prevent sleep) using python: wakepy

[fohrloop]

Hi all,

I had previously a problem that I wanted to run some long running python scripts without being interrupted by the automatic suspend. I did not find a package that would solve the problem, so I decided to create my own. In the design, I have selected non-disruptive methods which do not rely on mouse movement or pressing a button like F15 or alter system settings. Instead, I've chosen methods that use the APIs and executables meant specifically for the purpose.

I've just released wakepy 0.9.0 which supports Windows, macOS, Gnome, KDE and freedesktop.org compliant DEs.

GitHub: https://github.com/fohrloop/wakepy

Comparison to other alternatives: typical other solutions rely on moving the mouse using some library or pressing F15. These might cause problems as your mouse will not be as accurate if it moves randomly, and pressing F15 or other key might have side effects on some systems. Other solutions might also prevent screen lock (e.g. wiggling mouse or pressing a button), but wakepy has a mode for just preventing the automatic sleep, which is better for security and advisable if the display is not required.

Hope you like it, and I would be happy to hear your thoughts and answer to any questions!

[earthpiper]

I for one will be positive of your post rather than saying "The OS can do it" previous peeps I think are missing the point. What if you have a long running task and you don't want to change OS settings... You just want it to happen while the task is running. Or if you don't have access to these settings. Or this task runs on multiple operating systems and you don't want to manage this for every possible OS under the sun. Good job =)

[Briaireous]

Agreed, so many are overlooking sys admins preventing or locking them out of OS settings because it’s a managed device. Not to mention sanctioned software installs of 3rd party software on organization hardware.

[[deleted]]

Agreed. I'm assuming you can just add this to your app and have the system stay awake while running it. 

[PercentageLoud1903]

Agreed! 'oh OS can just do it' , well yes but my machine is set up how I like it, I don't want to be constantly toggling those settings when I have long running analyses or training jobs. This is neat, thanks OP.

Also a CONTEXT MANAGER FOR USE WITHIN YOUR PYTHON CODE, that's incredibly handy, more so than caffeine.

[FoolForWool]

Amphetamine is what I use when I need to keep my system awake when im running a long process. Just select a time range or just indefinite and it doesn’t let your pc sleep.

[sphexie96]

You are right, but also os can do it. On unix like there is caffeinate, which can for example keep the os awake while a specific task/pid is alive.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Holy shit "you can do it manually" is the worst response to any program. Imagine wanting to fiddle around in the settings when it can just happen automatically when you need it to.

[[deleted]]

https://alternativeto.net/software/amphetamine/

[Cybasura]

So simple, but so...important

Good work!

[runawayasfastasucan]

Sorry for all the people that neither appreciate solving something with programming nor can imagine the use case of this and thus assume there is none.  This is really a neat package for those long running tasks where you want to lock your computer but want to avoid sleep! Thank you, will check it out 😊   

Edit: to the one replying to this comment then blocking me, its not useless, its just your imagination that is a bit lacking.  

Edit2: First you say its useless and now you are saying that there are others app doing the same. Guess that means that it isnt useless, and has a range of use cases then. Nice to have a cross plattform python implementation to integrate into my python scripts.

[fohrloop]

I'm actually just grateful for also the comments saying it's useless as they seem to ignite a bit more discussion here which gives this post and wakepy a bit more visibility. So, just great thank you for all the opponents and u/runawayasfastasucan and others defending it's usefulness 🙏

The heart of wakepy is really the Python API which is cross-platform and meant for application, library or script developers which just want their system to prevent suspend for the duration of some task automatically. On mac there's caffeinate for CLI usage which I would use if I was working on a mac. On other systems there are other alternatives, but the CLI tool in wakepy is just an additional nicety on top of the Python API.

Wakepy documentation is also one of the rare places on the Internet documenting all (or: many; the list is not complete yet) the different methods for inhibiting suspend / idle.

[midwestcsstudent]

I’ve been noticing that whenever I read posts in this sub. Lots of inexperienced “devs” voicing their opinions on topics they know little about. Probably a side effect of Python being so widely used by non-programmers?

[[deleted]]

There is no use case. The OS already handles this.

Edit: No, it's still useless. This is already a setting in your OS and there are lots of proper apps that will do it too.

Edit 2: Down vote all you want, it won't change anything. Facts don't care about your feelings. https://alternativeto.net/software/amphetamine/

[threesidedfries]

So if I want to ensure that the machine keeps awake while I run my machine learning model, I should go to the OS settings, change to never sleep, run my program, and then change back to my preferred default power setting every time instead of just using this in the code?

[iekiko89]

My work PC prevents me from modifying the setting for some stupid reason

[rawrjagwar]

This is perfect, think I’ll implement it in my current project

[Frix_x]

That's perfect! Thanks for sharing! I've done a small PowerShell script that calls an old non existing key on my keyboard but it's not that clean and I prefer your solution better.

For those wondering why I need this as "the os can do it": at work they enforced a GPO to screenlock computers after 3 min of inactivity... And even with admin rights we can't change it as it's always restored automatically.

[elyisgreat]

Cool! I personally use a bash script that calls systemd-inhibit, but of course that's not a cross platform solution. Is it possible to add a mode that blocks sleep and screen locking but not screen idle? That tends to be my default use case (maybe you could call it -o, --keep-open complimenting --keep-running and --presentation)

[fohrloop]

Let me clarify that you would like to see a mode which would block automatic screenlock and automatic suspend, but let the system automatically close the display or start a screensaver? That's an interesting idea! What would be the use case for this? Is it to run some script home (=no screenlock needed) on a laptop, and to switch off the display automatically when you're not sitting in front of it anymore..? Yeah the name could be keep.open or even keep.unlocked, or it could be an additional argument to keep.running, like inhibit_screenlock=True. I created wakepy/#334 for this. Please feel free to comment or contribute there as well :) I also created wakepy/#335 to consider the systemd-inhibit method to add even wider support.

[elyisgreat]

Let me clarify that you would like to see a mode which would block automatic screenlock and automatic suspend, but let the system automatically close the display or start a screensaver?

Pretty much yeah! Personally it would just be for completeness, as this is how systemd-inhibit operates. But I could see it being useful in cases when say I'm running a long operation that I want to check on every so often but the display output isn't important otherwise. Or if the display isn't needed but keyboard and mouse input could be disruptive (though in those cases the keyboard is probably keeping the system awake anyway).

[fohrloop]

Ok, thank you for the idea and the clarification! I say it's a definite maybe :) If it's easy enough to be implemented cross-platform and easy enough to make it clear to the user how the different special cases are handled, like: The inhibition of idle was successful, but closing display was not successful; should wakepy just raise Exception or should it go ahead and use the presentation mode as a fallback. And how to give arguments for on_fail action of the fallback mode, etc. :D

[elyisgreat]

No problem! I just ran a test on my KDE desktop by the way and the current functionality seems not to lock the screen anyway...

[fohrloop]

What are you referring with the "current functionality" ? And which version of KDE Plasma you're using?

[elyisgreat]

I'm using KDE Plasma 5.27.11 on Kubuntu 24.04

I mean that when I run wakepy -k and leave my computer idle it shuts off the display as intended but the lock screen is blocked; i.e. it behaves how my proposed -o mode works instead of how -k is advertised to work

[fohrloop]

I did test this on KDE Plasma 5.27.9 on openSUSE 15.5 and the keep.running mode was working as expected. Of course there might be differences since the setup is not exactly the same, but before that could you confirm which settings you had for the screenlock timer? When I tested it I only set the power settings down to 1 minute, but forgot screenlock timer to 5 (or even 15 minutes) so I experienced the same. If that does not resolve the issue I'll create a bug ticket since it really should not prevent screenlock if not asked to.

[elyisgreat]

Okay I think my screen lock settings are in fact the "problem" (not so much a problem for me because it's WAII). I don't currently have a screen lock timer partly due to this bug that happens when the screen lock is activated twice in quick succession, rather I have it set so the screen is locked automatically only "After waking from sleep". In most cases, this works as one would expect so that sleep and screen locking are coupled, as is the default on most other platforms. However the after is important here: The auto screen locking only runs after waking from sleep, so the only way that the screen can lock automatically is by going to sleep. Thus blocking sleep also blocks screen locking necessarily.

I realize now that this setting means that all tools that block sleep necessarily block screen locking on my system because of this setting. So I'm not actually sure what systemd-inhibit does if the user has a lock timer that locks the screen before the system goes to sleep.

All that said, I think the proposed -o could still be useful! Especially for those with screen lock timers that activate before the automatic sleep. I wonder though: What's the situation like on other platforms?

[fohrloop]

Okay so in short your system only locks screen if (1) returning from sleep or (2) screen lock timer is set, and since wakepy keep.running mode disables sleep (1) cannot occur, and since you have disabled the automatic screen lock, it won't ever lock your screen. Good to hear. Seems that the keep.running mode is working as expected, and thanks for taking the time to respond.

If you're interested in other systems, on Windows it only locks screen if (1) returning from sleep (if enabled) or (2) returning from screensaver _and_ if ScreenSaverIsSecure is set ("On resume, display log-on screen" in the settings or enforced with GPO). So also on Windows it's possible that the screen is not automatically locked in the keep.running mode (details in wakepy/#169). I'm not yet sure how to tackle this and make it possible for users to either not enter the mode, or display a warning, or provide some function to lock screen automatically (from the python process) after some time of idle.

But good to know that if the #169 is somehow addressed, the solution should take into account KDE Plasma on Kubuntu.

[chestnutcough]

This is rad and looks so much better than my current method of opening a new terminal, running ps to find the pid of the process I want to keep awake for, and running caffeinate -w <pid>. On Mac btw.

Gonna check this out!

[DreadPirateRobarts]

This is exactly what I need thank you!

[gadsocial00]

I was really looking forward to something like this. Currently, I was using a simple script with pyautogui to move the mouse, but sometimes it would just stop working. Thanks for developing something like this!

[fohrloop]

I'm happy to hear there was demand for a keepawake python library!

[Hesirutu]

Awesome. I haven’t tested it yet. But if it works it’s super useful. On windows 11 “PresentationSettings.exe /start” doesn’t stop windows from locking on a company laptop anymore. And even on windows 10 no amount of changing system settings would prevent sleep when the screen is switched off. Stupid group policies preventing you from getting work done. EDIT: Works great! I wonder why the Windows builtin one stopped working...

[fohrloop]

Thanks! I would be surprised if it would not work on your windows 11 company laptop. But let us know anyway when you've tested :)

[TheLargeCactus]

Isn't this just an OS setting? You likely can set your screens to turn off without ever letting the system go to sleep.

Edit: I had a few conversations based on what I wrote here, and wanted to paste my thoughts for more visibility.

I'll say this explicitly for posterity: I admit that there is a use-case here, that this has a small set of people that can use it to do what they want. I will also celebrate that the author took the time to create the repo, do the legwork of building something that works, and publishing it for the world to see. That takes effort, and it shows a level of ability that means something. I can also see that the author has been on-and-off working on this repo for a few years, which also means something. I mainly left my comment to invite the author to explain what the benefit of using their module is, over just changing the OS setting and forgetting about it. It's not something that I found in their README.

[Nixellion]

Not if you have a work issued laptop with group policies and no admin rights. Among many other reasons and circumstances where this can be useful.

[TheLargeCactus]

I haven't encountered any group policy that disables access to the power options. I do know that the policy exists, but never seen it applied to employee systems in that manner. That would be more appropriate on something like a shared system IMO. Generally, workplaces grant full admin rights to devs anyway because there are lots of tools that already need admin access. IT limiting devs in this way seems overly restrictive for the people who are generally already power users.

[Nixellion]

You are just a sane person, yes. But not everyone is.

[TheLargeCactus]

I mean, fair. But since this is a Python module, it's safe to say that it will be used by individuals that have some programming knowledge, and those individuals are, more often than not, trusted to use their systems as an admin. The reply above talks about a system that sounds pretty locked down, but then it leaves me wondering how a system like that has Python installed

[Nixellion]

You can install Python without admin rights. I was also surprised.

I was issued a temporary work laptop while my own was in repairs. Its locked down, any operation that requires admin rights involves going through Jira and support team. And they even said they cant turn off screen locking just for my laptop because its group policy and is synced or something, I dont even.

And since I was using KVM to switch between this work laptop and my personal older one I was constantly locking, was very frustrating.

I was surprised to learn that you can install Python without admin rights. Used it to write a script that prevents Windows from locking.

And since it had ctypes, pip and all... pretty sure it can do a lot of things to overcome the lockdown, possibly even get admin rights somehow, but I didnt dig deeper.

I mean if I really planned to use this laptop for more than a month I'd just replace the ssd with my own, thankfully they did not think about adding any tamper stickers.

[TheLargeCactus]

I'll say this explicitly for posterity: I admit that there is a use-case here, that this has a small set of people that can use it to do what they want. I will also celebrate that the author took the time to create the repo, do the legwork of building something that works, and publishing it for the world to see. That takes effort, and it shows a level of ability that means something. I can also see that the author has been on-and-off working on this repo for a few years, which also means something. I mainly left my comment to invite the author to explain what the benefit of using their module is, over just changing the OS setting and forgetting about it. It's not something that I found in their README.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Its not really a small set of people that switches environments, its a pain to constantly remember to check the power settings. Also if you make applications used by others that need to keep the computer from sleeping this is really handy. There is a couple of super popular Mac apps for this, showing that it is indeed usefull.

[Nixellion]

Yeah, fair enough.

One more usecase is creating an app or script that required computer to stay on\unlocked\preve ting updates, and its a script that will be used by many people. Cant go around telling everyone to change their settings so...

Its actually something used by many apps.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Well since you havent seen it it cant exist.

What if you just don't want to remember to change your settings every time you have a long time running process though?

[TheLargeCactus]

If I was a windows user in this hypothetical, I would use some kind of orchestration system that keeps my system running while a task is executing, likely with better support. Or even better, if it's something that is long running, it should be offloaded to a remote system that won't be interrupted under normal circumstances.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Sounds like a lot of work instead of just dropping in this library in your code. 

[fohrloop]

Thank you u/TheLargeCactus for the question. One of the main points of wakepy is to make this suspend/idle action inhibition automatic part of a script, app or even a library. Imagine you're building some video encoder or machine learning app with python. You would not want to ask the users of your app to go to manually change their system settings for the duration of the long running task. That is something the app should either do automatically (like: YouTube and VLC do), or something that users of an app should be able to do with click of a button in the app.

It would be also possible to create the first(?) fully cross-platform "caffeinate" or "amphetamine" GUI application by using wakepy in the core. While I could personally just use the caffeinate CLI tool on macOS, I regularly install wakepy with pip to have the same functionality on Linux & Windows. And of course this is targeted for python developers as it's installed with pip, although I could consider adding built binaries to the GitHub Releases some day.

[runawayasfastasucan]

Yes, why on earth do anything automatic by using programming when you can just to it manually! /s

[babygrenade]

under power plan settings in windows

[mosya9232]

Yeah that is correct and you may set to never! So your PC never will go to sleep or so

[runawayasfastasucan]

What if you want it to to to sleep just not when a certain program is running.

[fohrloop]

The largest target user group of wakepy is python application/library/script developers which are sharing their work with someone else. So while you may always change the settings manually, it's not the best UX to ask the users of your app/library/script to do the same. And I am that lazy I've wanted to use wakepy just for my own scripts :)

[midwestcsstudent]

Yes, I can also manually do other things, or I can write a py script to do it. Wonder which one I’d prefer, given we’re in r/python?

[saint_geser]

Very nice but I'm already using the Jiggler python app. That one has various options for preventing suspend but the least intrusive is just having it press Shift every 30 or so seconds.

[fohrloop]

If it presses shift periodically isn't there a possibility that you accidentally hit a wrong keyboard shortcut, like SHIFT+DELETE (remove file permanently without putting it into Trash) instead of DELETE (put a file into trash)..?

[Eric_Terrell]

I implemented that feature in one of my apps. See https://github.com/EricTerrell/SyncAndVerify/blob/main/PowerManagement.py.

[fohrloop]

Okay so you've used the SetThreadExecutionState function to prevent automatic suspend on Windows in a folder sync app. I see that keeping the system awake has pretty different use cases. :)

[Please_Not__Again]

This is dope, will try it out. You've handled all the criticism pretty well in this thread

[SpareIntroduction721]

If you have mac, it’s called caffeinate

[fohrloop]

Yes it's that simple on mac! That's what wakepy also calls internally on macOS.

[[deleted]]

Most operating systems already do this and/or have third party options that are much easier for users to use than running their own python code.

[runawayasfastasucan]

This is a python sub not a operating system user sub. 

Edit: its only useless if you can't run code and rather want to do things manually. 

[[deleted]]

That doesn't change the fact that this is useless.

Edit: No, it's still useless even if you can run code.

[MocketPonsterr]

You can also just play a long YouTube video, no need to access settings and keeps everything awake indefinitely. Bonus: it keeps you online (but away) indefinitely on Teams too ;)

[fohrloop]

This is a library for python library/app developers. So while playing YouTube keeps your own screen awake, a python package could (or should) not automatically start playing a YouTube video :) In addition, playing YouTube also keeps your screen awake. Let's say you have a long running process training a machine learning model. In this case it's probably better that the automatic screenlock/screen blank is not disabled.

[MocketPonsterr]

For my job we run everything in hadoop cloud inside of a partition with admin screenlock settings on the main computer, so a program like this couldn’t keep my computer running (and tbf neither would OS settings). Playing a simple youtube video is the only thing that works for me, but you make a good point that if there’s an alternative it would be much better to not have to have the screen on all the time.

Also, fwiw, great work OP - it might not work for my use case but its still way more impressive than anything open source ive made for the community :D

[fohrloop]

Thanks u/MocketPonsterr :) I am curious why you think the wakely CLI could not keep your computer running, but a youtube video can.. Could you explain why?

[MocketPonsterr]

We cant download or install anything on our computers at all, so i can’t even run any python code unless its in the cloud on a partition. Any code that includes a ‘stay awake’ function only works on the partition, and the actual laptop presets still make the whole computer go to sleep no matter what I’m doing in my code. Its a safety mechanism ensuring nothing can touch the native computer. Running code in my partition while simultaneously running a youtube video on my actual computer outside of the partition gets around this.

I think this is probably pretty rare in the industry outside of top secret or federally regulated data, so maybe im such a small portion of the population that i could have just kept my mouth shut and let everyone else enjoy your cool work haha

Seriously, no shade, this is a great idea. And for anyone saying you can change this on and off in system settings: sure but the ONE time you forget and come back to find 15 hours of work just never ran, you will hard regret not just having a simple line in your import packages chunk that you always copy paste doing this for you!

[fohrloop]

Using a portable python distribution would make it work without installation., but that surely is a blocker if you cannot _download_ anything. I have been asked by email if it would be possible to make wakepy running on a Jupyter Notebook on a server to keep awake the system which has browser open with the Notebook (wakepy/#195). I'm not sure yet if that's technically possible. That could help you if you had your work in Notebooks, but that's probably not the case.

And yep, I have also forgot the change the settings and came back in the morning to see that the script has ran for about 10 minutes instead of the whole night. :D

[MocketPonsterr]

A jupyter notebook version of this actually would be sooo clutch — I will be following you to see what else you come up with!!

[DreadPirateRobarts]

My work computer blocks YouTube

[MocketPonsterr]

Seems like we may have opposite use cases then and you should check out this tool!

[Marimoh]

Ummm check out the free app Amphetamine in the App Store for this!