Question 1

What is a cron expression?

Accepted Answer

A cron expression is a five-field string that defines a recurring schedule for automated tasks. The fields, left to right, represent: minute (0–59), hour (0–23), day of month (1–31), month (1–12), and day of week (0–7, where 0 and 7 are Sunday). A star (*) means 'every value'. For example, '0 9 * * 1' means every Monday at 09:00.

Question 2

What do the special characters in a cron expression mean?

Accepted Answer

* means 'every'. / means step: */5 in the minute field means every 5 minutes. - defines a range: 1-5 in day-of-week means Monday through Friday. , separates a list: 1,3,5 means Monday, Wednesday, Friday. ? is used in some implementations to mean 'no specific value' — the DevBench editor uses * for this purpose.

Question 3

How do I run a cron job every 5 minutes?

Accepted Answer

Use */5 * * * * — this means 'at minute 0, 5, 10, 15 … of every hour, every day'. Enter it in the Cron Editor and the plain-English description and next 10 run times will confirm it.

Question 4

What is the difference between cron and GitHub Actions schedule syntax?

Accepted Answer

GitHub Actions uses the same 5-field cron syntax with one difference: all times are in UTC. A cron of '0 9 * * 1' in GitHub Actions fires at 09:00 UTC on Mondays. On a server, the timezone depends on the system's locale. The Cron Editor shows run times in your local browser timezone.

Question 5

Why did my cron job not run at the expected time?

Accepted Answer

Common reasons: the server clock is in UTC but you wrote the expression in local time; the cron daemon was not running; a syntax error prevented the expression from being parsed; or the job ran but exited silently. Paste the expression into the Cron Editor and verify the next run times match your intent.

Cron Schedule Editor

Next 10 Scheduled Runs

Common Cron Expressions

Cron Syntax Reference

Minute Precision

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Local Time

How to read a cron expression

Quick reference

Where cron expressions are used