2026-05-25 · 5 min read
Cron schedules recurring tasks on Unix-like systems and in orchestrators such as Kubernetes CronJob. A typical expression has five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week.
Examples
Always confirm whether your platform uses UTC or local time. Daylight saving shifts can cause duplicate or skipped runs if misunderstood.
- */15 * * * * — every 15 minutes
- 0 2 * * * — daily at 02:00
- 0 9 * * 1 — Mondays at 09:00
Testing before deploy
Preview the next N run times with a cron helper before committing to production. Document the intended human meaning next to the expression in your infrastructure repo.