selfcaffeinate

Description

Python module to prevent macOS system sleep using the caffeinate(1) command

Introduction to caffeinate(1)

macOS users can prevent system sleep using the system command caffeinate like so:

$ caffeinate sh -c "echo sleeping; sleep 60; echo done"
sleeping
done
$

Or hold a power management assertion on an existing process:

$ pgrep long-running-process
555
$ caffeinate -w 555 && echo "done"
done

This module allows caffeinate to be used programmatically from Python code to prevent system sleep, without having to run the command externally.

Example usage

def main():
    print("Self caffeinating")
    SLEEP_PERIOD = 60
    sc = SelfCaffeinate()
    for i in range(0, 60):
        print("Sleeping {}".format(SLEEP_PERIOD))
        time.sleep(SLEEP_PERIOD)

Or use the with pattern:

def main():
    print("Self caffeinating")
    SLEEP_PERIOD = 60
    with SelfCaffeinate():
      for i in range(0, 60):
          print("Sleeping {}".format(SLEEP_PERIOD))
          time.sleep(SLEEP_PERIOD)

The default path to macOS's caffeinate should work, but if you have an alternate path, you can specify that:

def main():
    print("Self caffeinating")
    SLEEP_PERIOD = 60
    sc = SelfCaffeinate(caffeinate_path="/path/to/my/weird/caffeinate")
    for i in range(0, 60):
        print("Sleeping {}".format(SLEEP_PERIOD))
        time.sleep(SLEEP_PERIOD)