Paste any cron schedule expression to see it explained in plain English along with the next several run times. Useful for verifying your cron jobs are set up correctly before deploying.
5-field format: minute · hour · day of month · month · day of week
The tool uses the cronstrue library to translate cron expressions into plain English, and pure JavaScript date arithmetic to compute the next scheduled run times. Everything runs in your browser. Our servers are not involved.
All parsing and scheduling calculations happen locally in your browser tab. Our servers are not involved at any point.
For checking patterns inside log lines or schedules, try the regex tester. To work out the gap between two scheduled runs, use the date calculator. For converting cron timestamps to readable dates, see Unix timestamp.
A cron job is a scheduled task that runs automatically at specified times or intervals on Unix-like systems. The schedule is defined using a cron expression, a string of five fields representing minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week.
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). Special characters include * (any), , (list), - (range), and / (step).
The / character means 'step'. So */5 in the minute field means 'every 5 minutes', */2 in the hour field means 'every 2 hours', and so on.
The expression is parsed and explained entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Our servers are not involved at any point.
@hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, and @yearly are shorthand cron expressions. For example, @daily is equivalent to 0 0 * * * (midnight every day).