What is a cron expression?
A cron expression is a compact way to schedule a recurring job. The standard form has five fields separated by spaces: minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. Each field takes a number, a range (1-5), a list (1,15,30), a step (*/15), or a star for every value. Cron is used by Unix crontab, CI pipelines, and most schedulers.
How to use this cron parser
Type a 5-field cron expression, for example */15 9-17 * * 1-5, and the tool shows a plain-English meaning plus the next five run times in your local time zone. It updates as you type, so you can confirm a schedule does what you expect before deploying it. Everything runs in your browser.
The five fields
- Minute 0 to 59
- Hour 0 to 23
- Day of month 1 to 31
- Month 1 to 12
- Day of week 0 to 6, where 0 and 7 are Sunday
Cron FAQ
What does */15 mean? A step: every 15 units. In the minute field it means at minute 0, 15, 30, and 45.
How are day-of-month and day-of-week combined? When both are restricted, the job runs when either matches, which follows standard Unix cron.
Which time zone are the run times in? Your browser local time zone. Server cron usually runs in the server time zone, so account for the difference.
