Does Home Assistant handle SIGTERM gracefully?

jms3000 · June 27, 2026, 10:05am

I'm running Home Assistant Core in a Python venv on Ubuntu. My UPS monitor (NUT) triggers a system shutdown via shutdown -h +0 when the battery is low. Before the system shuts down, systemd sends SIGTERM to all services including the HA process.

I checked the HA source code for any SIGTERM handler but couldn't find one:

grep -r "SIGTERM\|signal.signal" ~/homeassistant/lib/python*/site-packages/homeassistant/

This returned no results.
My concern is that HA gets killed hard by SIGTERM without flushing its state, closing the database etc.
Does HA handle SIGTERM gracefully, or is it a hard kill?
(I know that HA core is no longer supported but maybe there people which answer anyway)

checking12 · June 28, 2026, 8:44am

Yes it does. I have an automation that's triggered on ha shutdown and it nicely triggers when I stop the container.
If you have issues with exit codes, consider extending stop_grace_period.

koying · June 28, 2026, 1:42pm

github.com/home-assistant/core

homeassistant/helpers/signal.py

ea55fa2a2

"""Signal handling related helpers."""

import asyncio
import logging
import signal

from homeassistant.const import RESTART_EXIT_CODE
from homeassistant.core import HomeAssistant, callback
from homeassistant.util.hass_dict import HassKey

_LOGGER = logging.getLogger(__name__)

KEY_HA_STOP: HassKey[asyncio.Task[None]] = HassKey("homeassistant_stop")


@callback
def async_register_signal_handling(hass: HomeAssistant) -> None:
    """Register system signal handler for core."""

    @callback

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jms3000 · June 28, 2026, 2:16pm

Great! Thank you very much for your help!
I made a stupid mistake: I was searching with
grep -r SIGTERM *.py
but this does not work as expected because *.py is not resolved recursive.