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Cron Presets

Eight well-known cron nickname strings (@yearly, @annually, @monthly, @weekly, @daily, @midnight, @hourly, @reboot) paired with their canonical five-field cron expressions and plain-English descriptions. These aliases are supported by Vixie cron and its descendants (cronie, the Debian/Ubuntu cron) and by many other cron implementations and libraries; systemd timers use similar but not identical shorthands without the @ (e.g. OnCalendar=weekly means Monday 00:00).

v1.0.0 MIT 8 records Updated 2026-10-05 stable Source:  crontab(5) man page (cronie, derived from Vixie cron), cronie source repository

Quick fetch

Stable URL. CORS-enabled. No auth.

bash 
curl https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.json

Or use as a typed import: import { cronPresets } from "https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.ts"

Formats

  • JSON 1.1 KB

    /v1/cron-presets.json

    Open

    min: 965 B · /v1/cron-presets.min.json

  • CSV 658 B

    /v1/cron-presets.csv

    Open
  • TypeScript 1.3 KB

    /v1/cron-presets.ts

    export const cronPresets

    type CronPreset = (typeof cronPresets)[number]

    Open

Schema

Each record in the dataset has the following shape.

Schema
Field Type Description Example
alias string Special-string nickname recognized by cron (e.g. @daily) @daily
expression string Equivalent five-field cron expression, or @reboot for the startup preset 0 0 * * *
description string Human-readable explanation of when the job runs Run once a day at midnight.

Preview

First 8 records.

Data preview
aliasexpressiondescription
@yearly0 0 1 1 *Run once a year at midnight on January 1st. Equivalent to @annually.
@annually0 0 1 1 *Run once a year at midnight on January 1st. Equivalent to @yearly.
@monthly0 0 1 * *Run once a month at midnight on the first day of the month.
@weekly0 0 * * 0Run once a week at midnight on Sunday.
@daily0 0 * * *Run once a day at midnight. Equivalent to @midnight.
@midnight0 0 * * *Run once a day at midnight. Equivalent to @daily.
@hourly0 * * * *Run once an hour at the beginning of the hour.
@reboot@rebootRun once at startup (when the cron daemon starts). Not a standard five-field expression.

Showing 8 of 8. View full data:  JSON · CSV

Fetch examples

Drop-in snippets in five languages.

curl 
curl -sSL https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.json | jq '.[0]'
JavaScript 
import type { CronPreset } from "https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.ts";

const res = await fetch("https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.min.json");
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`Fetch failed: ${res.status}`);
const cronPresets: CronPreset[] = await res.json();
console.log(cronPresets[0]);
Python 
import urllib.request, json

with urllib.request.urlopen("https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.min.json") as r:
    cronPresets = json.load(r)

print(cronPresets[0])
Go 
package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	resp, err := http.Get("https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.min.json")
	if err != nil { panic(err) }
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	var data []map[string]any
	if err := json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&data); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(data[0])
}
Rust 
use serde_json::Value;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let body = ureq::get("https://staticdata.dev/v1/cron-presets.min.json").call()?.into_string()?;
    let data: Vec<Value> = serde_json::from_str(&body)?;
    println!("{:?}", data.first());
    Ok(())
}

Sources and methodology

This dataset was curated from the crontab(5) man page of Vixie cron and its descendant cronie, which first introduced the @-prefixed special strings as a convenience layer over the standard five-field syntax. The eight entries represent the complete, canonical set: @yearly and @annually are interchangeable aliases for January 1st at midnight; @monthly runs on the first of each month; @weekly runs every Sunday at midnight; @daily and @midnight are interchangeable aliases for midnight every day; @hourly fires at the top of every hour; and @reboot runs once when the cron daemon starts.

The @reboot entry is intentionally kept as a literal @reboot string in the expression field because it has no equivalent five-field representation — it is a scheduler-level directive, not a time-based schedule. Consumers that only accept standard five-field expressions should treat @reboot as a special case.

Both @yearly/@annually and @daily/@midnight pairs resolve to identical five-field expressions (0 0 1 1 * and 0 0 * * * respectively). They are included as separate records because both spellings appear in real crontab files and documentation, and a lookup table covering all recognized aliases should map each one explicitly.

Versioning

URLs under /v1/ are stable: field names and types will not change in a way that breaks consumers. Values can be corrected or records added when the upstream source changes; schema-incompatible updates ship under a new version path. See the cron-presets changelog for this dataset's history.

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