Cron Expression 0 0 * * * Meaning
Cron expression 0 0 * * * means At 12:00 AM.
Cron expression 0 0 * * * means run once every day at midnight. This 2026 guide explains field-by-field meaning and when to choose this schedule in production.
Cron Expression
Common use cases
- Daily midnight resets for quotas and counters
- Nightly backups and data retention cleanup
- End-of-day reconciliation and report publishing
- Rolling logs and archival jobs at date boundaries
How to use this cron schedule
The meaning of cron expression 0 0 * * * is: minute zero, hour zero, every day of month, every month, and every weekday. In plain language, your job runs exactly once each day at 12:00 AM server time. If your query was cron expression 0 0 * * * meaning, this page is the direct answer. In 2026, this remains the default schedule for daily boundary work like resets, reporting, and light maintenance because it is easy for teams to reason about and easy to verify during incident response.
Midnight scheduling is simple, but production reliability still depends on timing context. Many teams place too many heavy tasks at 12:00 AM, creating queue spikes and delayed starts. A safer pattern is to keep critical boundary logic at midnight, then shift resource-heavy processing to 1 AM or 2 AM. Confirm timezone behavior in your scheduler before rollout, especially if your business reports in America/Los_Angeles while infrastructure runs in UTC. Explicit timezone notes in code and runbooks prevent avoidable confusion when operators compare logs across systems.
For 2026 operations, treat this schedule as part of a monitored workflow rather than a standalone string. Add retries with sensible limits, emit start and finish events, and alert on repeated failures. Daily jobs usually feed downstream dashboards, billing, or customer notifications, so one silent miss can create broad data drift. Test next-run timestamps in staging, validate idempotency, and pair this expression with clear ownership. That combination makes `0 0 * * *` both predictable and safe at scale.
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 expression 0 0 * * * meaning
0 0 * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/script.php
# Or run a shell script
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 * * *'
jobs:
run:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Run job
run: echo "Running expression 0 0 * * * meaning"apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: my-scheduled-job
spec:
schedule: "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 expression 0 0 * * * meaning?
The cron expression is 0 0 * * *. Cron expression 0 0 * * * means run once every day at midnight. This 2026 guide explains field-by-field meaning and when to choose this schedule in production.
How do I schedule a cron job to run expression 0 0 * * * meaning in Linux?
Open your crontab with "crontab -e" and add a new line: 0 0 * * * /path/to/your/script.sh — this schedules your script to run expression 0 0 * * * meaning. Save and exit; the cron daemon picks up the change immediately.
What does the cron expression "0 0 * * *" mean?
Cron expression 0 0 * * * means run once every day at midnight. This 2026 guide explains field-by-field meaning and when to choose this schedule in production.
Can I use "0 0 * * *" in GitHub Actions?
Yes. In your workflow YAML, set the schedule trigger: on: schedule: - cron: '0 0 * * *'. GitHub Actions uses standard 5-field Unix cron syntax, so this expression works as-is.