epochkit

Cron expression for every Friday

The cron expression 0 0 * * 5 runs at 12:00 AM, only on Friday. The restricted fields are minute 0, hour 0, and day of week 5; the remaining asterisks match anything. That works out to one run per week.

0 0 * * 5
Edit this schedule in the cron builder Read the cron cheat sheet

Field breakdown

Field-by-field meaning of the cron expression 0 0 * * 5
Field Value Meaning
Minute 0 The top of the hour (:00)
Hour 0 00:00 (midnight)
Day of month * Every day of the month (1–31)
Month * Every month (1–12)
Day of week 5 Friday

Next runs

Next 5 runs Timezone: UTC
  1. —
  2. —
  3. —
  4. —
  5. —

Run times are calculated in your browser timezone. The scheduler that executes the job uses its own — always UTC on Vercel Cron, UTC by default on GitHub Actions, the host clock on crontab.

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 0 * * 5 — minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week — against the clock once a minute and starts the job on any minute where all five match, which cronstrue reads as "At 12:00 AM, only on Friday": one run per week. The day-of-week field is numbered 0 to 6 with Sunday at 0, so 5 selects Friday. Day of month is left as an asterisk, so the calendar date is unrestricted and only the weekday decides.

When to use every friday

Friday is the day for end-of-week summaries, a cleanup pass before the weekend, and cutting a release candidate on a predictable rhythm. The trap is the hour: 00:00 on Friday is Friday's first minute, so a job meant to wrap up the working week actually runs before any of that week's Friday has happened. If the week's work needs to be included, move the run to Friday evening, or schedule it on Saturday and look back a day. Weekend-adjacent jobs also deserve a thought about who is around to fix them.

Common mistakes with every friday

The failure here is conceptual, not syntactic. 0 0 * * 5 is the first minute of Friday, so a weekly summary on this schedule reports on Monday through Thursday and none of Friday — an off-by-one-day error that survives review because the expression reads correctly out loud. Decide whether the job looks forward into the week or back over it, then pick the hour to match. Friday also raises an operational question Monday does not: a job that fails at 00:00 on Friday has one working day left in which somebody can notice it before the weekend closes the window.

Platform snippets

The same expression, ready to paste into the four schedulers that read five-field cron. The notes below each snippet are the ones that follow from this schedule; the cron expression generator lists every caveat for every platform.

GitHub Actions

yaml 
name: Scheduled workflow
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * 5'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  scheduled:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run job
        run: echo "Running scheduled job"
  • • Workflows scheduled at the top of the hour may be delayed during high-load periods. Consider offsetting the minute field (e.g. "5 0 * * 5") for more reliable timing.

Kubernetes CronJob

yaml 
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-cron-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 * * 5"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: job
              image: my-image:latest
              command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "echo Running"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
  • • Do NOT use CRON_TZ or TZ inside the schedule string. Kubernetes 1.29+ rejects this at creation with a validation error; earlier versions issue a warning. Existing CronJobs using TZ/CRON_TZ will continue to warn on update. Use the timeZone field instead.

Vercel Cron

json 
{
  "$schema": "https://openapi.vercel.sh/vercel.json",
  "crons": [
    {
      "path": "/api/cron",
      "schedule": "0 0 * * 5"
    }
  ]
}
  • • Hobby plan: invocations occur within the specified hour (e.g. "0 8 * * *" runs between 08:00:00 and 08:59:59).

crontab

bash 
# Edit your crontab: crontab -e
0 0 * * 5 /path/to/command

# With logging:
0 0 * * 5 /path/to/command >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Variations

Frequently asked questions

How do I read the cron expression 0 0 * * 5?

Read the five space-separated fields left to right as minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. In 0 0 * * 5 the minute is 0, hour is 0, day of month is *, month is *, day of week is 5. Of the operators cron defines, this expression uses only the ones that matter here: an asterisk matches every value in its field. Put together, cronstrue reads the whole thing as "At 12:00 AM, only on Friday", and a scheduler that checks all five fields once a minute will start the job one run per week.

What timezone does 0 0 * * 5 run in?

The expression carries no timezone of its own: it names hour 0, and the scheduler decides which hour 0 that is. Read as UTC, the run lands at 00:00 — 19:00 the previous day in New York, 00:00 in London, and 09:00 in Tokyo on a January date, with daylight saving moving the first two later in the year, so the same UTC instant is 20:00 the previous day in New York in July. That offset crosses a calendar day, and this schedule is pinned to a weekday, so the local weekday moves with it: the Friday run at 00:00 UTC happens at 19:00 on Thursday in New York. A job that reads the weekday back from the local clock there will disagree with the expression that scheduled it. Set the zone rather than converting by hand where you can: GitHub Actions defaults to UTC but takes an optional timezone key beside cron, and a Kubernetes CronJob has spec.timeZone, stable since 1.27. Where you cannot, convert deliberately: Vercel Cron is UTC-only, and a Linux crontab follows the host clock unless CRON_TZ overrides it.

Does 0 0 * * 5 run on Friday morning or Friday night?

The expression fires at 00:00 on Friday — the very start of the day, a minute after Thursday ends. That is Friday morning, not Friday evening, and it is a frequent source of off-by-one-day confusion in weekly jobs that were meant to summarize the week just finished. For an end-of-week run after the work is done, use 0 17 * * 5 or 0 23 * * 5. To summarize Friday itself, schedule the job on Saturday with 0 0 * * 6 and read the previous day's data.

Related cron schedules

Build a custom schedule in the cron expression generator, or browse every epochkit tool.