Natural Language to Cron Expression
Type a schedule in plain English ("every Monday at 9am", "every 15 minutes", "first of every month at midnight") and get the matching cron expression. Companion to our cron next-runs calculator.
How to use the Natural Language to Cron Expression
Type a schedule in plain English, or click an example chip. The matching cron expression appears below, ready to paste into a crontab or scheduler. Phrases like intervals, daily and weekly times, and monthly schedules are all understood.
Turning plain English into cron
Cron’s five-field syntax is compact but unintuitive — getting “every weekday at 9am” right means knowing that day-of-week is the fifth field, that 0 and 7 both mean Sunday, and how step values like */15 behave. Most people end up reverse-engineering an expression from an example rather than writing one from intent, which is exactly backwards.
This goes the natural direction: type a schedule in plain English (“every 15 minutes”, “first of every month at midnight”) and get the matching cron expression. It writes the expression from intent; to confirm it fires when you expect, list the upcoming times with the cron next-runs calculator, and to read an existing expression back into English, use the crontab helper.
Common use cases
- Write a schedule — turn an intent like “every Monday 9am” into cron directly.
- Avoid syntax errors — skip hand-counting the five cron fields.
- Learning cron — see how a phrase maps to each field.
- Quick crontab entry — get an expression to paste into a crontab.
- CI schedules — produce the cron a scheduled workflow needs.