This is a simple program to inhibit sleep/suspend on systemd based Linux systems (or on compatible systems running elogind). Some examples of the default plugins provided are:
-
Plugin to inhibit sleep while any audio is playing.
-
Plugins to inhibit sleep while Plex or Jellyfin media server is serving media server is serving content.
-
Plugin to inhibit sleep while a specified process is running. I use this to prevent sleep while my home backup is running.
You can also create your own custom plugins. They are extremely trivial to create as can be seen in the provided examples. A plugin can be created in shell script or any programming language. It must simply return an exit code to indicate whether the system should can be slept/suspended, or not. Sleep-inhibitor runs each plugin at the period you specify (or the default 5 minutes) and checks the result to inhibit sleep or not until at least the next check period.
The latest version of this document and code is available at https://github.com/bulletmark/sleep-inhibitor.
When looking for a solution for this issue I found the autosuspend package but, in addition to providing plugins, that package also implements the complete sleep, resume, and wakeup logic. I also found the configuration and documentation confusing. I am happy with and prefer to use the native Linux sleep systems and I desired a simpler more lightweight approach that merely provided the ability to inhibit these sleep systems for some special situations.
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On Linux desktop systems, I prefer to use the standard GNOME power management GUI tools to automatically manage sleep/suspend (via systemd). All the major DE's provide similar GUI tools.
-
On Linux server systems, I prefer to use standard systemd power management to manage sleep/suspend, configured via
logind.confandsleep.conf.
These native approaches work well, and are easy to configure.
Sleep-inhibitor assumes you are using the native systemd based sleep
facilities and merely adds the ability to add/create tiny plugins to
inhibit sleep for specified conditions. Sleep-inhibitor uses
systemd-inhibit
to execute the sleep inhibition lock.
Arch users can just install sleep-inhibitor from the AUR then skip to the next Configuration section.
Python 3.7 or later is required. The 3rd party ruamel.yaml package is
also required. Note sleep-inhibitor is on
PyPI so just ensure that
pipx is installed then:
To install:
$ sudo PIPX_HOME=/opt/pipx PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/bin pipx install sleep-inhibitor
To upgrade:
$ sudo PIPX_HOME=/opt/pipx PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/bin pipx upgrade sleep-inhibitor
To remove:
$ sudo PIPX_HOME=/opt/pipx PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/bin pipx uninstall sleep-inhibitor
Some plugins require other software to be installed. E.g. If you use the
plex-media-server
or
jellyfin-server
plugins then you must install curl.
To start, copy the sample
sleep-inhibitor.conf
configuration file to /etc/sleep-inhibitor.conf and then edit the
sample settings in that target file to add/configure plugins to your
requirements. The instructions and a description of all configuration
options are fully documented in the sample configuration
file.
$ sudo cp "$(sleep-inhibitor -P)/sleep-inhibitor.conf" /etc
$ sudoedit /etc/sleep-inhibitor.conf
If you installed from source or via pip then copy the included
sleep-inhibitor.service
to /etc/systemd/system/ (note that Arch
users who installed from
AUR can skip this
first step):
$ sudo cp "$(sleep-inhibitor -P)/sleep-inhibitor.service" /etc/systemd/system/
Start sleep-indicator and enable it to automatically start at reboot with:
$ sudo systemctl enable --now sleep-inhibitor
If you change the configuration file then restart with:
$ sudo systemctl restart sleep-inhibitor
To see status and logs:
$ systemctl status sleep-inhibitor
$ journalctl -u sleep-inhibitor
To use the standard
plugins
distributed with this package just specify the plugin name (i.e. the
file name) as the path parameter in the configuration
file.
To use your own custom plugins, just specify the absolute path to that
plugin. E.g. you can put your custom plugin at /home/user/bin/myplugin
and just specify that full path in the configuration
file.
A plugin can be any executable script/program which simply returns exit code 254 to inhibit suspend, or anything else (usually 0 of course) to not suspend. They can be very trivial to create as the provided example plugins demonstrate. A plugin can be created in any language you prefer such as Shell, Python, Ruby, C/C++, etc.
The plugin does not normally receive any arguments although you can
choose to specify arbitrary arguments to any plugin via the configuration
file, e.g. a sensitive token/password as the example
plex-media-server
plugin requires, or the process name for the example
is-process-running
plugin.
Type sleep-inhibitor -h to view the usage summary:
usage: sleep-inhibitor [-h] [-c CONFIG] [-p PLUGIN_DIR] [-P]
Program to run plugins to inhibit system sleep/suspend.
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
alternative configuration file
-p PLUGIN_DIR, --plugin-dir PLUGIN_DIR
alternative plugin dir
-P, --package-dir just show directory where sample conf/service files,
and default plugins can be found
Copyright (C) 2020 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.