Cron Every Week (2026)
Cron expression 0 0 * * 0 means At 12:00 AM, on Sunday.
Cron every week in 2026 commonly uses 0 0 * * 0 for Sunday midnight. This guide explains weekly timing, weekday numbering, and deployment best practices.
Cron Expression
Common use cases
- Weekly planning and KPI summary jobs
- Sunday maintenance windows
- Weekly backup verification routines
- Low-frequency reconciliation and cleanup
How to use this cron schedule
Cron every week usually means one scheduled run per week on a fixed day and hour. A common choice is `0 0 * * 0`, which triggers Sunday at midnight in standard Unix cron. This weekly cadence is useful when daily execution is unnecessary and teams prefer one predictable checkpoint for heavy maintenance, archive management, or long-horizon reporting. In 2026, weekly cron jobs are still widely used because they are simple to reason about and inexpensive to operate.
When implementing weekly schedules, verify weekday numbering in your platform before activating side effects. Most systems map `0` to Sunday, and some also accept `7`, but minor differences between tools can cause one-day shifts. Test next-run timestamps in staging, especially if infrastructure runs in UTC while business reporting expects a local timezone. Weekly jobs often run during low-traffic windows, so add explicit success notifications for Monday-morning stakeholders who depend on the output for planning or compliance tasks.
Weekly automations should prioritize recoverability. Because runs are infrequent, a single missed execution can leave a full week gap in reports or backups. Add retry policies, run-duration metrics, and a last-success indicator visible in your monitoring dashboard. If the workflow includes several heavy steps, split them into smaller jobs with clear ownership and ordering. That keeps troubleshooting fast and reduces the blast radius of failures while preserving the operational clarity that makes weekly cron schedules attractive.
Want to customize this schedule?
Open it in the visual builder to tweak the expression interactively.
Open in BuilderNeed to monitor this cron job?
Cronhub tracks your scheduled jobs and alerts you if they fail or run late.
Platform usage examples
# Edit your crontab
crontab -e
# Add this line to run every week (2026)
0 0 * * 0 /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/script.php
# Or run a shell script
0 0 * * 0 /home/user/scripts/job.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1# .github/workflows/scheduled.yml
name: Scheduled Job
on:
schedule:
- cron: '0 0 * * 0'
jobs:
run:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Run job
run: echo "Running every week (2026)"apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: my-scheduled-job
spec:
schedule: "0 0 * * 0"
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: job
image: my-image:latest
restartPolicy: OnFailureRelated developer tools
More free tools for engineering workflows that pair with scheduled jobs:
Frequently asked questions
What is the cron expression for every week (2026)?
The cron expression is 0 0 * * 0. Cron every week in 2026 commonly uses 0 0 * * 0 for Sunday midnight. This guide explains weekly timing, weekday numbering, and deployment best practices.
How do I schedule a cron job to run every week (2026) in Linux?
Open your crontab with "crontab -e" and add a new line: 0 0 * * 0 /path/to/your/script.sh — this schedules your script to run every week (2026). Save and exit; the cron daemon picks up the change immediately.
What does the cron expression "0 0 * * 0" mean?
Cron every week in 2026 commonly uses 0 0 * * 0 for Sunday midnight. This guide explains weekly timing, weekday numbering, and deployment best practices.
Can I use "0 0 * * 0" in GitHub Actions?
Yes. In your workflow YAML, set the schedule trigger: on: schedule: - cron: '0 0 * * 0'. GitHub Actions uses standard 5-field Unix cron syntax, so this expression works as-is.