Cron expression for every weekend

Field breakdown

Next runs

How this schedule works

Cron evaluates the five fields of 0 0 * * 6,0 — 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 and Saturday": 2 runs per week. The day-of-week field is numbered 0 to 6 with Sunday at 0, so 6,0 selects Sunday and Saturday. Day of month is left as an asterisk, so the calendar date is unrestricted and only the weekday decides.

When to use every weekend

The weekend is the natural window for anything disruptive: heavy maintenance, batch reprocessing that saturates a database, long migrations you would not want competing with live traffic. Two runs a week, both at a time when production is usually quiet. The trade-off is staffing. A job that fails at 00:00 on Saturday can go unnoticed until Monday, so weekend schedules need alerting that actually reaches a human, and the work needs to be safe to re-run once whoever it reaches gets to a keyboard.

Common mistakes with every weekend

The expression trips people twice. Saturday and Sunday sit at opposite ends of a field numbered 0 to 6, so they cannot be written as a range: 6-7 happens to work on some Linux builds, where 7 is accepted as an alias for Sunday, and is rejected elsewhere. Write 6,0 or SAT,SUN. The operational trap is the larger one. Weekend jobs run when nobody is watching, and a maintenance task that fails at 00:00 on Saturday may not be looked at until Monday, by which point both runs of the weekend are gone.

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 * * 6,0'
  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 * * 6,0"
  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 * * 6,0"
    }
  ]
}

# Edit your crontab: crontab -e
0 0 * * 6,0 /path/to/command

# With logging:
0 0 * * 6,0 /path/to/command >> /var/log/cron.log 2>&1

Variations

• 0 0 * * 0,6 At 12:00 AM, only on Sunday and Saturday The identical schedule with the days listed the other way round. Cron sorts the list itself, so the order carries no meaning at all.
• 0 0 * * SAT,SUN At 12:00 AM, only on Saturday and Sunday The same two days by name. This is the form to prefer: it cannot be misread as a range, and it never invites the 6-7 mistake.
• 0 3 * * 6,0 At 03:00 AM, only on Sunday and Saturday Weekends at 03:00, deep in the quiet window. Buys a heavy migration several more hours of low traffic than a midnight start does.
• 0 0 * * 1-5 At 12:00 AM, Monday through Friday The inverse — Monday to Friday. Weekdays can be written as a range because they are contiguous in the field; the weekend cannot.