Getting started

Desomnia needs to be runs as a background service with elevated privileges, so that it can monitor system activity and control sleep behaviour.

Available installation methods

To install Desomnia, pick the method that fits your platform and preferences:

Interactive installer – 🪟 Windows

Installs required dependencies, registers the service, and creates an initial configuration.

Homebrew – 🐧 Linux, 🍎 macOS

Native deployment, with all features available. Installs required dependencies, helps with service registration.

Update to newer versions easily.

Docker – 🐧 Linux

Containerised deployment, with limited features available. Required dependencies are bundled; no installation required.

Update to newer versions easily.

Manually – 🐧 Linux

Requires you to install the .NET runtime and additional libraries/tools yourself. Can be used to test Desomnia in portable mode.

What to read next

Once Desomnia is installed, you have to choose how you want to operate Desomnia primarily on that system, since there are individual guides written for each style. However, since Desomnia has a unified codebase, both modes of operation can also be used together.

Local Sleep Management

OS:

🪟 Windows 🐧 Linux

If you want to replace the built-in power management with Desomnias configurable monitoring, the Local Sleep Management guide is the best place to start. You can use the automatic Wake-on-LAN feature here as well.

Automatic Wake-on-LAN

OS:

🪐 Platform-independent

If your primary goal is to wake remote hosts on demand, head directly to the Wake-on-LAN guides: start with Wake-on-LAN: Client if Desomnia should run locally on the machine that initiates the connection, or Wake-on-LAN: Proxy if you want it to run on an always-on device that watches the network and send Magic Packets on behalf of other hosts. The proxy deployment is the most sophisticated and feature rich.

Remote Access

If you want to reach sleeping hosts from outside your local network, read the Remote Access guide. It walks through four approaches in order of complexity: plain port forwarding, routed unicast Magic Packets (no always-on proxy required if your router supports static ARP entries), VPN-backed proxy mode, and Single Packet Authorization (SPA) for authenticated, on-demand access without a persistent tunnel.

Note

If anything does not behave as expected, consult the troubleshooting page. Enabling logging is usually the first step — Desomnias output is minimal by default and a log file will usually reveal what’s going on inside.