Cron Generator & Explainer

Create a 5-part cron schedule or paste an existing expression to see a human-readable explanation.

Format: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week

Cron Summary
Expression
0 9 * * 1-5
Explanation

At 09:00 every weekday

About Cron Schedules

Cron expressions are used to schedule repeated tasks on servers, cloud platforms, and deployment pipelines. This tool makes cron easier to use by letting you build a schedule from fields and instantly read what the expression means.

  • Use `1-5` in day-of-week for weekday-only jobs and `*/15` for every 15 minutes.
  • Test copied cron strings before using them in production because some platforms support extra syntax beyond standard 5-part cron.
  • Keep a human-readable note beside your cron schedule so future edits are easier to review.

About the Cron Generator & Explainer

The Cron Generator helps you build cron expressions for scheduled jobs and explains existing expressions in plain English. Cron is the scheduling syntax used by Linux crontab, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub Actions, Hangfire, Quartz, AWS EventBridge and many hosting control panels. One wrong field can make a backup run every minute instead of once a day, so it is worth checking the schedule before you deploy it.

How to Use the Cron Generator & Explainer

  1. Pick a preset such as every 5 minutes, daily or weekly, or enter each field yourself.
  2. Read the plain-English description to confirm the schedule.
  3. To understand an existing schedule, paste its cron expression into the explainer.
  4. Copy the expression into your crontab, CI workflow or scheduler configuration.

The Five Cron Fields

A standard cron expression has five fields: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12) and day of week (0–6, where 0 is Sunday). * means every value, */15 means every 15th value, 1-5 is a range, and 1,15 is a list. Some systems such as Quartz add a seconds field at the start, so check the documentation of the tool you use.

Common Examples

*/5 * * * * every five minutes. 0 * * * * at the start of every hour. 0 2 * * * every day at 02:00. 30 9 * * 1-5 at 09:30 on weekdays. 0 0 1 * * at midnight on the first day of each month. 0 3 * * 0 every Sunday at 03:00.

Time Zones and Pitfalls

Cron runs in the time zone of the server or service, which is often UTC rather than your local time. Pakistan Standard Time is UTC+5, so a job you want at 09:00 PKT should usually be written for 04:00 UTC. Avoid scheduling many jobs at exactly midnight, and remember that if both day-of-month and day-of-week are set, many cron implementations run the job when either matches.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does */5 mean?

It means every fifth value of that field. In the minute field, it runs at 0, 5, 10, 15 and so on.

Is Sunday 0 or 7?

Both are accepted by most cron implementations, but 0 is the most portable choice.

Does GitHub Actions use the same syntax?

Yes, GitHub Actions uses five-field cron syntax and always runs schedules in UTC.

Why didn't my job run?

Check the time zone, make sure the script path and permissions are correct, and look at the scheduler's logs for errors.