Cron Hourly Generator
Pre-loaded with 0 * * * * — fires once an hour at the top of every hour.
What does cron `0 * * * *` mean?
0 * * * * fires once an hour, at minute 0 — i.e. the top of every hour: 00:00, 01:00, 02:00, ... 23:00, every day. It's the equivalent of `@hourly` on cron implementations that support nicknames. Hourly is a very common scheduling cadence: refreshing data warehouses, processing the last hour's logs, sending hourly notifications, or running a heartbeat health check. Note the leading 0 — leaving it as `*` (which gives `* * * * *`) means every minute of every hour, which is 60x as often.
Visual Builder
Presets
Manual
Minute0-59, * for every, */5 for every 5 minutes
Hour0-23, * for every, */2 for every 2 hours
Day of Month1-31, * for every, 1,15 for specific days
Month1-12, * for every, 1-6 for Jan through Jun
Day of Week0-6 (0=Sunday), * for every, 1-5 for weekdays
Generated Expression
0 * * * *
At minute 0
Next 5 Runs:
5/2/2026, 3:00:00 PM5/2/2026, 4:00:00 PM5/2/2026, 5:00:00 PM5/2/2026, 6:00:00 PM5/2/2026, 7:00:00 PM
Cron Reference
Special Characters
* Any value
, Value list separator
- Range of values
/ Step values
Day of Week Values
0=Sun1=Mon2=Tue3=Wed4=Thu5=Fri6=Sat
About the hourly cron pattern
0 * * * * fires at minute 0 of every hour, every day, in the daemon's local time zone.
- Field positions: minute hour day-of-month month day-of-week
- Leading `0` pins to the top of the hour — `* * * * *` runs every minute instead
- Equivalent shortcut: @hourly (Vixie cron extension, not in AWS/Kubernetes)
- For every Nth hour, use step syntax: 0 */2 * * * runs every 2 hours