Cron Expressions Explained (Schedules Made Simple)

Cron schedules background jobs — backups, reports, cache clears. A cron string uses five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week.

Standard five-field format

Symbols you'll see

• * means every value in that field
• */15 in the minute field = every 15 minutes
• 1-5 in day-of-week often means Monday–Friday (check your platform)

Test before production

Off-by-one errors in day-of-week or timezone mismatches cause jobs to fire at the wrong local time. Always confirm the next few run times in your environment’s timezone.