Read Any Cron Expression in Plain English
Cron strings are short and easy to get wrong. 0 0 * * 0 and 0 0 * * 7 both mean "midnight on Sunday", and 0 0 13 * 5 runs far more often than most people expect. The Cron Expression Explainer turns an expression into a sentence, breaks down each field, and lists the next ten times the job will actually fire, so you can check a schedule before it goes into a crontab, a Kubernetes CronJob or a CI workflow.
The Five Fields
- Minute (0-59)
- Hour (0-23)
- Day of month (1-31)
- Month (1-12 or JAN-DEC)
- Day of week (0-7 or SUN-SAT; both 0 and 7 are Sunday)
Each field accepts * (any value), lists (1,15), ranges (9-17) and steps (*/5, 0-30/10). The macros @hourly, @daily, @weekly,@monthly and @yearly are expanded to their 5-field equivalents.
Why the Next-Run List Matters
An explanation tells you what an expression says, but the run list shows what it does. A job set for February 30th never runs. A leap-day job runs once every four years. A job that sets both day fields runs on the union of the two. Seeing real dates catches all of these before production does.
Private by Design
The parser runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you paste is sent to a server. To build a new expression from scratch, use the Cron Generator. To convert epoch values from job logs, try the Timestamp Converter.