Dawn

The Dawn trigger fires at dawn, the moment the morning twilight begins and the sky starts to brighten before the sun rises. You choose how dark “dawn” 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 start a gentle wake-up routine, raise blinds before the sun is up, or switch off lights that ran through the night, all timed to the first light rather than 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: Dawn.
5. Under Twilight type, select Civil, Nautical, or Astronomical to choose how dark the start of dawn 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.dawn. A basic example looks like this:

trigger: sun.dawn

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

trigger: sun.dawn
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.
• Dawn always happens before sunrise. Astronomical dawn is the earliest, then nautical, then civil, then Sunrise.
• 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 evening, use Dusk.

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 dawn, 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: raise the bedroom blinds at dawn

When civil dawn breaks, raise the bedroom blinds so the room wakes up with the morning light.

• Trigger: Dawn
  • Twilight type: Civil
• Action: Open cover
  • Target: Bedroom blinds

alias: "Raise bedroom blinds at dawn"
triggers:
  - trigger: sun.dawn
actions:
  - action: cover.open_cover
    target:
      entity_id: cover.bedroom_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:

• Dusk: Triggers at dusk, when civil, nautical, or astronomical twilight ends.

• Sunrise: Triggers when the sun rises.

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