* * * * *every minute
Every minute
Every hour
Every day of month
Every month
Every day of week
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Cron syntax, codified in the POSIX standard, drives scheduled jobs across Linux servers, GitHub Actions, cloud functions, and workflow automation platforms like n8n. The 5-field format — minute, hour, day-of-month, month, day-of-week — is deceptively simple but error-prone in edge cases: "every weekday at 9 AM in business months" requires combining a weekday field with a month range, and a single field error can shift a billing job by hours or days without any runtime warning.
The visual builder maps each UI control (dropdowns, checkboxes, step inputs) to the corresponding cron field and assembles the expression string in real time. As you interact with the controls, the English translation is regenerated by a parser that handles all special characters: * (wildcard), / (step), , (list), and - (range).
The next-execution calculator uses your browser's Intl.DateTimeFormat API to resolve the local timezone, then walks forward minute by minute from "now" evaluating each cron field against the candidate timestamp. The first 10 matching timestamps are collected and displayed with full date, time, and timezone offset.
In reverse (Explain) mode, the pasted expression is tokenized into its five fields and each field is translated into a prose description. A field of "*/15" becomes "every 15 minutes"; "1-5" in the weekday field becomes "Monday through Friday".
A backend engineer setting up a database backup job builds the expression visually and verifies the next 10 execution times before deploying to production.
A developer configuring a GitHub Actions schedule workflow pastes an existing cron string to confirm it fires at the intended UTC time, not a timezone-shifted time.
An n8n workflow builder uses the tool to generate the correct cron expression for a weekly newsletter send at 10 AM every Tuesday in their local timezone.
A DevOps engineer reviewing an inherited cron job pastes the expression to get an instant English explanation without consulting a man page.
Use the visual dropdowns to select minute, hour, day, month, and weekday
See the generated cron expression and its English explanation in real-time
Check the next 10 execution times to verify the schedule
Or paste an existing cron expression to decode and visualize it
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