0 3 * * *
Cron reads this as: at 03:00.
Next 5 runs
These times are in your browser's local time zone. Cron itself uses the server's zone, which on most cloud hosts is UTC. If the difference matters here, see time zones & DST.
- Calculating…
When to use this schedule
This is a good default for a nightly job. It runs after the midnight rush and after the daylight saving transition window, and it still leaves several hours before the working day for a long-running job to finish or for someone to react to a failure.
What to watch out for
There is little to watch for in the schedule itself. The remaining questions are operational: whether the job is idempotent if it has to be re-run, whether its output goes somewhere you will look, and whether you will find out if it stops running. The most common cron failure is a nightly job that silently stopped three weeks ago, and the choice of schedule does nothing to prevent it.
The crontab line
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/your-job.sh >> /var/log/your-job.log 2>&1Send the output to a log you will read. By default cron mails it, and on a host with no mail transport that mail is silently dropped. See the crontab guide for the surrounding syntax.
Related schedules
| Expression | Schedule |
|---|---|
0 3 * * 1-5 | 03:00 on weekdays only |
0 3 * * 0 | 03:00 on Sundays only |
30 3 * * * | 03:30 daily |
Build your own
If this page doesn't cover the schedule you need, compose it field by field in the visual builder, or paste an expression you already have into the explainer for a per-field breakdown. The examples library has sixty schedules in one place, and the guides cover crontab syntax, time zones, troubleshooting and production practices.