Cron Syntax⚓
Summary⚓
Taken from the healthchecks.io docs.
Basics⚓
A cron expression has five fields, separated by spaces. Asterisk is a wild card character and means
"any value".
"Run every minute"
* * * * *
Day of week, 0 - 7, 0 or 7 is Sun
Month, 1 - 12
Day of month, 1 - 31
Hour of day, 0 - 23
Minute, 0 - 59
Numeric Values⚓
Use numeric values instead of asterisks to match specific minutes, hours, days and months.
"Run at 6PM on Fridays"
0 18 * * 5
Run only on Fridays
Run every month of the year
Run every day of the month
Run at 6PM
Run at the start of the hour
Commas⚓
Use {v1},{v2},...,{vn} to list multiple values.
"Run at 9AM, 12PM and 6PM every day"
0 9,12,18 * * *
Run on every weekday
Run every month of the year
Run every day of the month
Run at 9AM, 12PM and 6PM
Run at the start of the hour
Ranges of Values⚓
Use {start}-{end} to define a range of matching values.
"Run every minute on workdays"
* * * * 1-5
Run on Monday to Friday
Run every month of the year
Run every day of the month
Run every hour of the day
Run every minute of the hour
Ranges with a Step⚓
Use {start}-{end}/{step} or */{step} to define a range with a step.
"Run every quarter of an hour"
*/15 * * * *
Run on every weekday
Run every month of the year
Run every day of the month
Run every hour of the day
Run every 15 minutes
Combine Numeric Values and Ranges in Lists⚓
In the comma-separated lists you can combine not only numeric values but also ranges.
"Run every round hour outside office hours"
0 18-23,0-8 * * *
Run on every weekday
Run every month of the year
Run every day of the month
Run at 6PM, 7PM, 8PM, ..., 7AM, 8AM
Run at the start of the hour
Abbreviated Day and Month Names⚓
JAN-DEC can be used in the month field and MON-SUN in the weekday field.
"Run every round hour on April 1st"
0 * 1 APR *
Run on every weekday
Run in April
Run on the first day of the month
Run every hour of the day
Run at the start of the hour
Timezones⚓
Cron daemon uses server's local time. If your server's timezone is other than UTC, make sure to set a matching timezone for your check on Healthchecks.io as well.
On Ubuntu systems you can check the server's timezone with:
cat /etc/timezone