Cron parser

About Cron parser

Turns a five- or six-field cron expression into plain English in your browser. It explains schedules; it does not run them or compute next fire times.

Cron strings are concise until you forget whether field two is hour or minute. I stare at 0 9 * * 1-5 every spring and still translate it manually. Online cron calculators often want an account, or they silently assume a timezone you don't run in. This page takes a standard five-field cron (minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week) or a six-field cron with seconds, runs cronstrue locally, and prints a verbose English sentence. No upload, no 'register to see the next ten runs'. The field count is shown so you know whether you accidentally pasted a seconds-first line into a five-field mental model.

Explain-only is deliberate. Computing the next execution times needs a clock, a timezone, and rules about DST that vary by where the job actually runs. Your server's crontab, GitHub Actions, AWS EventBridge, and Kubernetes CronJob do not all agree on every edge case. I won't pretend one button knows which platform you're on. The description tells you what the fields mean; your scheduler tells you when it fires in prod. Read the English here, then confirm against the docs for the system that will actually trigger the job. Day-of-week and day-of-month both set to specific values can interact in ways your platform documents but this page will not simulate.

If the expression doesn't parse, you get cronstrue's error instead of a confident paragraph that misleads you. Quartz extensions, aliases like @daily, and nonstandard field counts aren't the target. This is for the Linux crontab line you inherited, or the schedule line in a YAML file you're reading, not for every vendor dialect under the sun. When the YAML converter shows a schedule key you do not recognise, paste just the cron string here and read it in plain language before you edit it. I use 24-hour wording in the description because that is what cronstrue emits here, not because your crontab runs in UTC.

How to use Cron parser

1. 1Paste a five- or six-field cron expression into the input.
2. 2Read the plain-English description that appears below.
3. 3Adjust the expression and watch the description update on the next parse.

What it won't do

• ·Explain-only via cronstrue. No next-run times and no timezone picker.
• ·Five- or six-field standard cron; not every vendor macro dialect.

Common questions

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