Question 1

How do I create a cron expression without memorizing the syntax?

Accepted Answer

Pick the schedule visually — minute, hour, day of month, month, and weekday — and this tool builds the cron expression instantly, with a plain-English explanation and upcoming run times so you can verify it before saving to crontab.

Question 2

What are the five cron fields?

Accepted Answer

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 (0-7, where both 0 and 7 mean Sunday). An asterisk means "every allowed value", slashes set steps like */15, commas list values, and hyphens set ranges.

Question 3

What does */15 * * * * mean?

Accepted Answer

It runs every 15 minutes, at minutes 0, 15, 30 and 45 of every hour, every day. The generator shows a plain-English description and the next five concrete run times for any expression, so you never have to guess.

Question 4

Why does my cron job run on the wrong days?

Accepted Answer

The usual trap is setting both day of month and day of week. Standard cron treats them as OR, not AND: 0 9 1 * 1 runs at 9 AM on the 1st of the month AND every Monday. Leave one of them as * unless you really want the combined behaviour.

Question 5

What timezone do the next run times use?

Accepted Answer

The preview uses your browser local time. Servers often run cron in UTC, so a 9 AM job in the preview may fire at a different local hour on the server. Check your server timezone (timedatectl on Linux) before relying on the schedule.

Question 6

Does this support seconds or year fields?

Accepted Answer

This generator covers the classic five-field format used by Linux crontab, most CI systems and serverless schedulers. Some systems add a leading seconds field or a trailing year field; those expressions are not supported here, and the tool will tell you if it cannot parse what you pasted.

Cron Expression Generator

Use Cron Expression Generator

How to use the Cron Expression Generator

Build your schedule

Read the description

Verify the next runs

About the Cron Expression Generator

Where it helps most

Linux crontabs

CI pipeline schedules

App task schedulers

Learning by example

Avoiding the gotchas

Plain-English preview

Server timezone

Trailing newline