Cron Expressions Explained With Real Examples

The five fields that matter

Classic cron uses minute, hour, day-of-month, month, and day-of-week. Get any one wrong and your backup job runs at 3am every day instead of Sundays — or never runs at all.

Always confirm timezone. A crontab that says "0 9 * * *" means 9:00 in the server's local time, which may not be the timezone your team thinks of as business hours.

Useful presets

These cover most ops schedules:

• */5 * * * * — every 5 minutes
• 0 * * * * — top of every hour
• 0 9 * * 1-5 — weekdays at 09:00
• 0 0 1 * * — first day of each month at midnight
• 0 2 * * 0 — Sundays at 02:00

Build and parse before you deploy

Use code.live's Cron Generator to assemble expressions from presets, then paste them into the Cron Expression Parser to see a plain-English summary and upcoming run times. Catch off-by-one day-of-week mistakes before they hit production.