Build a 5-field cron schedule visually, explain cron syntax in plain English and preview next run times in your browser.
A
cron expression
is five space-separated fields that tell a scheduler
when
to run a job:
minute,
hour,
day of month,
month
and
day of week
. A job fires whenever the current time matches all five fields. Each field accepts a single value, a list (
1,15,30
), a range (1-5), a step (*/15) or
*
for “any”.
Use this cron expression generator to build common schedules, explain cron expressions in plain English, and preview next scheduled runs before adding a job to crontab, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions or another 5-field scheduler.
One classic gotcha: when both day-of-month and day-of-week are restricted, most cron implementations treat them as OR — the job runs when either matches, not both. This tool follows that rule when computing the next runs. Cron compatibility still varies between schedulers, especially for seconds fields, year fields and advanced tokens, so confirm production syntax in your target scheduler. Everything is calculated entirely in your browser using your device clock — nothing you build is uploaded.
This tool generates standard 5-field Unix/Vixie cron expressions used by crontab, many Linux schedulers, Kubernetes CronJobs, and GitHub Actions. It does not generate Quartz seconds or year fields.
The preview uses your browser local time zone. Real cron jobs run in the scheduler or server time zone, often UTC, so confirm the runtime environment before deploying.
In many 5-field cron implementations, both 0 and 7 mean Sunday. This tool accepts standard names such as SUN-SAT and numeric values according to its 5-field parser.
Yes. Cron compatibility varies across Unix crontab, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Quartz, cloud schedulers, and application libraries. Check your scheduler documentation before using advanced syntax in production.
No. Parsing, plain-English descriptions and next-run calculations happen client-side in your browser.