Cron Expression Examples

How to read a cron expression

Every cron expression example on this page follows the same five-field format: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. The expression */5 * * * * fires every five minutes because the first field says "every fifth minute" and the remaining four are just wildcards. Swap the asterisk in the second field for a number — 0 9 * * * — and the job runs once a day at 9:00 AM instead.

If you need to build something more specific than what's listed here, the cron expression builder lets you construct a schedule visually and preview the next five runs. Already have an expression but aren't sure it's right? The cron expression validator will parse it and flag syntax issues before you deploy.

Common crontab examples and when to use them

In practice, most production schedules fall into a handful of patterns. Database backups typically run between 1:00 and 4:00 AM, when traffic is lowest. Health checks and queue workers fire every one to five minutes. Reporting scripts run once a day or once a week, usually timed to land in someone's inbox before the morning standup. That covers most of it.

The cron expression examples above are organized by both frequency and real-world task — backups, security scans, deployment pipelines, Laravel commands, Kubernetes CronJobs, WordPress maintenance. Pick a category, copy the expression, adjust the time if needed. Working with a distributed team? The cron timezone converter shows when a schedule actually fires in each region. The cron job calculator breaks down total executions by hour, day, week, and year — useful when you want to estimate load before committing.

After the cron schedule is set

Getting the expression right is half the job. The part that actually bites you is when a scheduled task silently fails — a backup script that exits with an error, a queue worker that hangs, a report that just never sends — the kind of thing you only discover when someone asks why the data looks three days old. Cron job monitoring watches for missed and failed runs and alerts you through Slack, email, or any channel you've configured, so problems surface before anyone notices the data's stale.