# Cron specification

The following describes a Cron specification. This is copied from the underlying libraries documentation.

A cron expression represents a set of times, using 6 space-separated fields.

Field name Required Allowed values Allowed special characters
Seconds No 0-59 * / , -
Minutes Yes 0-59 * / , -
Hours Yes 0-23 * / , -
Day of month Yes 1-31 * / , - ?
Month Yes 1-12 or JAN-DEC * / , -
Day of week Yes 0-6 or SUN-SAT * / , - ?

Note: Month and Day-of-week field values are case-insensitive.

## Special Characters

* The asterisk indicates that the cron expression will match for all values of the field. e.g., using an asterisk in the 5th field (month) would indicate every month. Slashes are used to describe increments of ranges. For example 3-59/15 in the 1st field (minutes) would indicate the 3rd minute of the hour and every 15 minutes thereafter. The form "*\/..." is equivalent to the form "first-last/...", that is, an increment over the largest possible range of the field. The form "N/..." is accepted as meaning "N-MAX/...", that is, starting at N, use the increment until the end of that specific range. It does not wrap around. Commas are used to separate items of a list. For example, using "MON,WED,FRI" in the 5th field (day of week) would mean Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Hyphens are used to define ranges. For example, 9-17 would indicate every hour between 9am and 5pm inclusive. Question mark may be used instead of '*' for leaving either day-of-month or day-of-week blank.

## Predefined schedules

You may use one of several pre-defined schedules in place of a cron expression.

Entry Description Equivalent Cron entry
@yearly (or @annually) Run once a year, midnight, Jan. 1st 0 0 0 1 1 *
@monthly Run once a month, midnight, first of month 0 0 0 1 * *
@weekly Run once a week, midnight on Sunday 0 0 0 * * 0
@daily (or @midnight) Run once a day, midnight 0 0 0 * * *
@hourly Run once an hour, beginning of hour 0 0 * * * *

## Intervals

You may also schedule a job to execute at fixed intervals. This is supported by formatting the cron spec like this:

1@every &lt;duration&gt;

where "duration" is a string accepted by time.ParseDuration.

For example, "@every 1h30m10s" would indicate a schedule that activates every 1 hour, 30 minutes, 10 seconds.

The interval does not take the job runtime into account.

For example, if a job takes 3 minutes to run, and it is scheduled to run every 5 minutes, it will have only 2 minutes of idle time between each run.

## Time zones

By default, all interpretation and scheduling is done in the machine's local time zone. The time zone may be overridden by providing an additional space-separated field at the beginning of the cron spec, of the form "TZ=Asia/Tokyo"

Be aware that jobs scheduled during daylight-savings leap-ahead transitions will not be run!

Last modified October 15, 2021: Switch print page breaks to css (d15ab85)