Dusk

The Dusk trigger fires at dusk, the moment the evening twilight ends and the last daylight fades after the sun has set. You choose how dark “dusk” is with the twilight type: civil, nautical, or astronomical. Home Assistant calculates the exact time for every day from your home location.

Use it to close blinds for the night, switch to evening lighting, or arm a routine once it is genuinely dark outside rather than at a fixed clock time.

Using this trigger from the user interface

If you prefer building automations visually, Home Assistant walks you through this trigger step by step. You pick what to watch, tweak a few options, and save. No YAML knowledge required.

To use this trigger in an automation:

1. Go to Settings > Automations & scenes.
2. Open an existing automation, or select Create automation > Create new automation.
3. In the When section, select Add trigger.
4. From the search box, search for and select Sun: Dusk.
5. Under Twilight type, select Civil, Nautical, or Astronomical to choose how dark the end of dusk is.
6. Select Save.

Options in the UI

Using this trigger in YAML

If you work directly in YAML, or you want to know exactly what Home Assistant does under the hood, this section has the technical reference. It lists the field names you use in YAML, their types, and which ones are required.

In YAML, refer to this trigger as sun.dusk. A basic example looks like this:

trigger: sun.dusk

This fires at civil dusk every day. To pick a different twilight phase, add the type option:

trigger: sun.dusk
options:
  type: astronomical

Options in YAML

Good to know

• This trigger does not use a target. It applies to the sun at your configured home location.
• Dusk always happens after sunset. Sunset comes first, then civil dusk, then nautical, then astronomical dusk last.
• The length of twilight changes through the year and with your latitude. Near the poles, a twilight phase can fail to occur on some days. When that happens, the trigger does not fire for that day.
• For the matching moment in the morning, use Dawn.

Try it yourself

Ready to test this? Go to Settings > Automations & scenes, create a new automation, and add this trigger. Save the automation, then change the state of the targeted entity to watch the trigger fire on your actual entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more].

For this trigger, there is no target entity to change. To test it, wait for the next dusk, or temporarily switch to a trigger you can control while you build the rest of the automation.

More examples

Real scenarios where this trigger fires in automations and scripts. Copy any example and adapt it to your setup.

Automation: close the blinds at dusk

When civil dusk falls, close the blinds throughout the house for the evening.

• Trigger: Dusk
  • Twilight type: Civil
• Action: Close cover
  • Target: All blinds (label)

alias: "Close blinds at dusk"
triggers:
  - trigger: sun.dusk
actions:
  - action: cover.close_cover
    target:
      label_id: blinds

Still stuck?

The Home Assistant community is quick to help: join Discord for real-time chat, post on the community forum with the trigger you’re using and what you expected to happen, or share on our subreddit /r/homeassistant.

Related triggers

These triggers work well alongside this one:

• Dawn: Triggers at dawn, when civil, nautical, or astronomical twilight begins.

• Sunset: Triggers when the sun sets.

• Sun elevation crossed threshold: Triggers when the sun’s elevation crosses a threshold you set.