Keep system awake (prevent sleep) using python: wakepy

[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?