- Streamlit apps sleep after a period of inactivity if hosted on Streamlit Community Cloud (free tier)
- To wake your app up, you need to click a button
- We can use Github actions + Selenium to automate this button clicking every couple of hours
Streamlit apps hosted on the Community Edition (free tier) go to sleep after some period of inactivity. This used to be 24 hours during weekdays and 72 hours on weekends but it had been cut down to 12 hours and that number might even be lower now. Given how we have used Streamlit for project demos and portfolio pages, this is quite a concern. In this article, I explore how to use Github actions to run a script every 4 hours that keep your Streamlit app from going to sleep.
On your Github account, create a new repo and pull it locally in your desired folder.
In your local repository, paste the following code in main.py file:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
import os
# Streamlit app URL from environment variable (or default)
STREAMLIT_URL = os.environ.get("STREAMLIT_APP_URL", "https://benson-mugure-portfolio.streamlit.app/")
def main():
options = Options()
options.add_argument('--headless=new')
options.add_argument('--no-sandbox')
options.add_argument('--disable-dev-shm-usage')
options.add_argument('--disable-gpu')
options.add_argument('--window-size=1920,1080')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install()), options=options)
try:
driver.get(STREAMLIT_URL)
print(f"Opened {STREAMLIT_URL}")
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 15)
try:
# Look for the wake-up button
button = wait.until(
EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, "//button[contains(text(),'Yes, get this app back up')]"))
)
print("Wake-up button found. Clicking...")
button.click()
# After clicking, check if it disappears
try:
wait.until(EC.invisibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//button[contains(text(),'Yes, get this app back up')]")))
print("Button clicked and disappeared ✅ (app should be waking up)")
except TimeoutException:
print("Button was clicked but did NOT disappear ❌ (possible failure)")
exit(1)
except TimeoutException:
# No button at all → app is assumed to be awake
print("No wake-up button found. Assuming app is already awake ✅")
except Exception as e:
print(f"Unexpected error: {e}")
exit(1)
finally:
driver.quit()
print("Script finished.")
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
Replace the value of the STREAMLIT_URL variable with your own app’s URL as a string.
Also in your local repository, create the file .github/workflows/wake.yml and paste the code below:
name: Wake Streamlit App
on:
schedule:
- cron: "0 */4 * * *" # every 4 hours
workflow_dispatch: # allow manual trigger
jobs:
wake:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout repo
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Set up Python
uses: actions/setup-python@v5
with:
python-version: "3.10"
- name: Install dependencies
run: |
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
- name: Run Selenium script
run: python main.py
At the base of your repository, add a requirements.txt file with the following contents:
selenium
webdriver-manager
Run the following commands to add and commit your changes:
git add .
git commit -m “add files”
git push
Needless to say, you can modify the commit message as you wish
Go to your repository on Github and confirm that the changes have been made, i.e., your files have been pushed. On that repo, click on the Actions tab as can be seen below:
You should be able to see the Wake Streamlit App workflow on the right, right under All Workflows. Click on the Wake Streamlit App. On the right, you should see a button that says Run Workflow. Click it. Another green button with the same label appears. Click it too. You will now see the workflow is in progress. This takes about 2 minutes. After the time has lapsed, check if your Streamlit app is awake. If not, check the logs on Github and debug.
And there you have it, a simple and free way to keep your Streamlit app awake (hopefully forever). You can find the full code example in this repository here. There is also an option to modify this workflow so that it makes an empty commit to the repository that the Streamlit app is deployed from in that same branch. Perhaps you can explore this option as well if you are feeling adventurous. Empty commits do not necessarily wake your app up but they do reset the clock that is counting down idle time to set your app to sleep. Let me know if you found this article helpful.
