Cron example
Cron Every Monday at 8 AM
One run a week: minute 0, hour 8, any day of the month, any month, day-of-week 1 — Monday. Weekly schedules are the cheapest way to keep recurring housekeeping off everyone's plate, and the easiest to forget about entirely until the week they silently stop working.
By NaveenKumar T · Updated · 5-field crontab expression
What each field means
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | Minute 0 |
| Hour | 8 | Hour 8 |
| Day of month | * | Every day |
| Month | * | Every month |
| Day of week | 1 | Monday |
Next 5 run times
Computing the next runs in your timezone…
How weekly schedules are built
Pinning the day-of-week field to a single value is what makes a schedule weekly; the day-of-month and month fields stay as asterisks so the job runs in every month, on whichever date that weekday falls. Monday is 1, and MON is accepted by most modern crons if you prefer names to numbers.
Because the day-of-week cycle is exactly seven days, weekly schedules are the best-behaved in cron: no month-length edge cases, no February problem, no drift. The only irregularity is the daylight saving transition, which shifts one run of the year by an hour on a local-time host.
A missed weekly run is expensive
With 52 executions a year, every one carries weight. If the machine is rebooting at 08:00 on a Monday, or the job exits early because a lock file was left behind, the work simply does not happen for another seven days — and unlike a five-minute poll, nothing catches up automatically.
Two habits pay for themselves: emit a heartbeat to a dead-man's-switch monitor so a missing run alerts you rather than passing unnoticed, and make the job catch up on what it missed rather than only processing the current week. Anacron or systemd timers with Persistent=true are the right tool if the host is not always on at the scheduled moment.
Choosing the day and hour
Monday morning suits work whose output starts the week: sprint reports, backlog digests, weekly rollups, dependency update checks. Work that should not land in the middle of a working week — heavy reindexing, retention pruning, full backups — belongs at the other end, like Saturday or Sunday at midnight.
To run on two days rather than one, use a list: 0 8 * * 1,4 fires Monday and Thursday. For the end of the working week instead of the start, Friday at 5 PM is the mirror image of this schedule.
Build a variant of this schedule with dropdowns and check the next ten runs before you install it.
Open the cron generatorRelated cron examples
Browse every schedule on the cron expression generator, read the cron expression syntax guide for the rules behind the five fields, or the developer tools guides for the longer explanations.