Cron expression for every week

Field breakdown

Next runs

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 0 * * 0 — 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 Sunday": one run per week. The day-of-week field is numbered 0 to 6 with Sunday at 0, so 0 selects Sunday. Day of month is left as an asterisk, so the calendar date is unrestricted and only the weekday decides.

When to use every week

A weekly run fits digests, rollups, rotating backups at the week boundary, and exports to an analytics warehouse where daily granularity is more than anyone needs. Sunday at 00:00 puts the run at the conventional start of the week, so the seven days it summarizes are the seven that just finished. With only 52 runs a year, each one carries weight: a single silent failure loses a week of output, which makes alerting and a documented manual re-run path far more important here than on a schedule that comes round again in five minutes.

Common mistakes with every week

A weekly schedule gets 52 chances a year to be right, which makes every mistake slow to surface and expensive when it does. The common one is the day. Cron's week starts at Sunday 0, so 0 0 * * 0 is Sunday and 0 0 * * 1 is Monday, and a report labelled weekly can be summarising a window that begins a day away from where the business thinks the week begins. The second is silence: a job that has not run for eight days is broken, but nothing in cron will say so. Alert on the absence of a successful run, not only on errors.

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.

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

jobs:
  scheduled:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run job
        run: echo "Running scheduled job"

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-cron-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 0 * * 0"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: job
              image: my-image:latest
              command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "echo Running"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

{
  "$schema": "https://openapi.vercel.sh/vercel.json",
  "crons": [
    {
      "path": "/api/cron",
      "schedule": "0 0 * * 0"
    }
  ]
}

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

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

Variations

• 0 0 * * 1 At 12:00 AM, only on Monday Weekly on Monday instead of Sunday. Which of the two is right depends entirely on where the business thinks the week begins.
• 0 9 * * 1 At 09:00 AM, only on Monday Monday at 09:00. A weekly job that fails at midnight on Sunday can sit broken for seven days; this one fails while someone is watching.
• 0 0 * * SUN At 12:00 AM, only on Sunday The same schedule with the day named. SUN is unambiguous; 0 relies on the reader knowing that cron's week starts on Sunday.
• 0 0 * * 0,3 At 12:00 AM, only on Sunday and Wednesday Sunday and Wednesday — twice a week, splitting the seven-day gap roughly in half without doubling the cost of a daily job.