Cron expression generator
Build standard 5-field cron expressions with presets and plain-English explanation. For crontab, GitHub Actions and CI schedulers. Free, in your browser.
Crontab syntax is five fields of archaeology. This generator gives you the common shapes as one-click presets — every 5 minutes, daily at 09:00, Mondays at 08:30, monthly on the 1st — and lets you edit any field directly. The expression and its plain-English meaning update live.
The output is standard 5-field crontab (minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week), the dialect understood by Linux cron, GitHub Actions (as the schedule key), GitLab CI, Jenkins and most schedulers. It does not emit the 6-field quartz dialect with seconds.
Edit fields for anything the presets don’t cover: steps like */10, ranges like 9-17, and lists like 1,15 all pass straight through, and the explainer describes them in plain English so you can sanity-check before pasting into production.
Frequently asked questions
- Which cron dialect does this generate?
- Standard 5-field crontab — Linux cron, GitHub Actions schedules, GitLab CI and Jenkins all speak it. Quartz (6 fields with seconds) is a different dialect.
- What time zone does cron run in?
- Whatever the server runs in — usually UTC on cloud machines. The expression contains no timezone; set TZ in your crontab or scheduler if you need local time.
- Why doesn’t my expression work in GitHub Actions?
- GitHub requires the schedule key in YAML (schedule: - cron: '…') and runs on UTC with delays of up to several minutes — the expression itself is standard.