Auto-shutdown for Azure VMs

A remote VM you forget about is a bill you did not plan. pks vm autoshutdown sets two independent safety nets on an Azure machine: an on-box idle monitor that powers it off after a period of inactivity, and a daily fixed-time shutdown enforced through Azure Resource Manager. It prints the updated settings table when it finishes.

Prerequisites

• An Azure VM. Scaleway instances do not support scheduled shutdown. The command prints a yellow notice and exits successfully without changing anything, suggesting you stop the machine manually from pks vm status.
• Azure authentication. The command fetches an Azure management token and fails with a pointer to pks azure init if it cannot.
• A reachable machine, for --idle. Changing the idle threshold requires SSH — the command patches the on-box pks-idle-monitor systemd service and restarts it.

1. Pick the machine

pks vm autoshutdown my-vm --idle 30

VM_NAME must match the tracked VM's name (case-insensitive). Omit it and an interactive selection prompt appears.

2. Choose the flags

The write is gated by the vm.autoshutdown.write action, which does not require a second factor by default.

3. How each flag behaves

--idle reconfigures /usr/local/bin/pks-idle-monitor over SSH and restarts the service, or stops and disables it when set to 0. It only takes effect when the tracked record already has both a public IP address and an SSH key path. When either is missing the remote change is skipped while the recorded value is still saved, so the table can show a threshold the machine is not enforcing.

--scheduled sets a daily Azure shutdown schedule. If the VM identifier lookup fails, that is reported as a warning and the schedule call is attempted anyway.

--disable clears both. If the Azure disable call fails it logs a warning and still stops the local idle monitor and zeroes the record, so local state can read as disabled while the cloud-side schedule survives.

Note. --disable short-circuits the command: it clears both the idle monitor and the Azure schedule and returns immediately, before any co-supplied --scheduled or --idle value is even looked at. --disable --idle 30 still ends with auto-shutdown fully disabled — the --idle 30 is silently ignored, not applied afterward. Use one intent per invocation.

4. Verify

pks vm status

The panel reports the idle and scheduled shutdown configuration for the machine. For the idle monitor specifically, confirm the machine was reachable when you made the change — a skipped SSH patch is the one case where the recorded value and the enforced value diverge.

5. Troubleshooting

See also

• Scheduling VM start and stop — the interactive superset that also schedules auto-start
• Start, stop, and destroy VMs — stopping a machine by hand
• Inspect VMs with list and status — where the effective settings are shown
• pks vm — the full command group