Cron expression for every hour

0 * * * *

The job runs at minute 0 of every hour, so at 00:00, 01:00, 02:00 and so on, twenty-four times a day. Many crons also accept @hourly as a shortcut.

Runs when: minute 0; every hour; every day of month; every month; any day of week.

Change it in the cron expression generator

How the five fields read

Field	Value	Reads as
Minute	`0`	at 0
Hour	`*`	every value
Day of month	`*`	every value
Month	`*`	every value
Day of week	`*`	every value

The next five runs

What people use it for

Rolling up metrics into hourly buckets
Syncing orders or inventory with another system
Rotating small log files

The first field decides everything

A common mistake is writing * * * * * when the plan was hourly. The minute field must be a number: 0 * * * * runs once an hour, while * * * * * runs sixty times. A second trap is the time zone. In UTC the hour starts at :00, but it begins at :30 in India (UTC+5:30) and :45 in Nepal (UTC+5:45), so check what "on the hour" means for the people reading your logs.

Variations of every hour

Expression	What it does
`17 * * * *`	Every hour at 17 minutes past.
`0 9-17 * * 1-5`	Every hour from 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday.
`30 /2 * *`	Every two hours, at :30 past: 00:30, 02:30, 04:30 and so on.

The same schedule in four tools

Linux crontab

0 * * * * /path/to/command

Add it with crontab -e. It runs in the machine's time zone.

Kubernetes CronJob

spec:
  schedule: "0 * * * *"
  timeZone: "Etc/UTC"
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid

timeZone is stable from Kubernetes 1.27. Without it, the controller's time zone applies. Forbid stops a new run starting while the last one is still going.

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 * * * *'

Schedules run in UTC from the default branch, and a run can start a few minutes late when GitHub is busy. Scheduled workflows in public repositories are disabled after 60 days without repository activity.

AWS EventBridge

cron(0 * * * ? *)

EventBridge uses six fields, with a question mark in one of the two day fields, and rules run in UTC. Weekday numbers start at Sunday = 1, so names such as MON are safer than numbers.

Questions about every hour

Is @hourly the same as 0 * * * *?: In Vixie cron and the crons based on it, yes. Kubernetes CronJobs accept @hourly too. GitHub Actions and AWS EventBridge do not accept the @ shortcuts, so write the full expression there.
How do I run hourly but skip the night?: Limit the hour field: 0 7-22 * * * runs at the top of every hour from 07:00 to 22:00.

Nearby schedules

Cron expression for every 30 minutes: Twice an hour.
Cron expression for every 6 hours: Four runs a day instead of twenty-four.
All schedules and the generator

Scheduling jobs, pipelines and cloud infrastructure is part of my DevOps engineering work.