I have had a problem with using i3 as a window manager getting screen locking and suspend to work but this is how I got it fixed.

I had pm-suspend working from the terminal with sudo and i3lock installed.

Had the advantage of also locking the screen however it needed to be run with a sudo command and password.

With an edit through visudo
%users ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend
it could be made so that you don’t need to type the password as the user, so the alias can become,

This got me thinking that it would be cool to be able to do this from a key press in i3 rather than a terminal.

The first part of doing this is to add the key short cut to .i3/config

bindsym $mod+p exec suspendandlock

then write a bash script into /usr/bin saved as suspendandlock

`
#!/bin/bash

suspend and lock

#`

Finally we have to modify the sudoers file again with visudo and change the %users to %wheel.

%wheel ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend

On Fedora 17 an additional edit is required with visudo, requiretty requires commenting out with visudo to be,

# Defaults requiretty

sECuRE from the i3 IRC chat helped out with the Fedora fix diagnosed through the log error.

requirement “uid >= 1000″ not met by user

within /var/log/secure

Now if everything is work mod+p will trigger power suspend and when you awake will ask for a password.