◷ Cron expression explainer
A cron expression has five fields: minute, hour, day-of-month, month and day-of-week. For example, */5 * * * * means every 5 minutes, and 0 9 * * 1-5 means at 09:00, Monday through Friday. Paste any expression here to get its plain-English meaning and next 10 run times in any timezone.
Paste a 5-field cron expression. Get what it means in plain English, when it runs next, and what could go wrong. Nothing is sent anywhere; it runs on our server in a few milliseconds.
The five fields
minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week. Each takes a number, * (any), a list 1,15, a range 9-17 or a step */10. Months and weekdays also accept names like JAN or MON.
What we check
Out-of-range values, backwards ranges, zero steps, 6-field (seconds) and Quartz syntax, dates that never exist, uneven steps, the day-of-month/day-of-week OR rule, and DST shifts in the run list.
Common schedules
every minute · every 30 seconds · every 2 minutes · every 3 minutes · every 5 minutes · every 7 minutes · every 10 minutes · every 15 minutes · every 20 minutes · every 30 minutes · all 45 →
Know the moment a cron job doesn't run
Paste the same expression into a Vigil heartbeat. Vigil works out when each run is due in your timezone, waits the grace period, then alerts you if the ping never came, if the job reported a failure, or if it started and never finished.