Cron Job Every Friday at 5 PM

Cron expression for every Friday at 5 PM

0 17 * * 5

At 17:00, only on Friday. It runs on 53 days a year.

Runs on Fridays at 17:00. It is popular for weekly summaries, timesheet reminders and tearing down preview environments before the weekend. Avoid scheduling automatic production deploys here: nobody wants to debug a failed release on Friday evening.

Field by field

Examples

crontab

Run crontab -e and add:

0 17 * * 5 /usr/local/bin/job.sh >> /var/log/job.log 2>&1

Kubernetes CronJob

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: my-job
spec:
  schedule: "0 17 * * 5"
  timeZone: "Etc/UTC"          # Kubernetes 1.27+
  concurrencyPolicy: Forbid    # skip a run if the last one is still going
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: job
              image: ghcr.io/acme/job:1.0
          restartPolicy: OnFailure

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 17 * * 5'   # UTC

GitHub evaluates schedules in UTC, and runs can start several minutes late at busy times.

systemd timer

# /etc/systemd/system/job.timer
[Unit]
Description=Run job.service every Friday at 5 PM

[Timer]
OnCalendar=Fri *-*-* 17:00:00
Persistent=true

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

Enable it with systemctl enable --now job.timer, and check the next runs with systemd-analyze calendar "Fri *-*-* 17:00:00". Persistent=true runs a missed job after downtime, which cron can’t do.

AWS EventBridge

cron(0 17 ? * FRI *)

EventBridge cron has six fields (the last is the year), uses ? in either the day-of-month or the day-of-week field, and numbers weekdays from 1 (Sunday) to 7. Rules run in UTC; EventBridge Scheduler also accepts a time zone.

Similar schedules: weekly

• Every weekday at 9 AM: 0 9 * * 1-5
• Every Saturday and Sunday at 10 AM: 0 10 * * 6,0
• Every Monday: 0 0 * * 1
• Every Monday at 9 AM: 0 9 * * 1
• Every Sunday: 0 0 * * 0
• Every other week: 0 9 * * 1

Have a different schedule? Paste any expression into the Cron Expression Generator, or browse all cron examples.

Sources

• POSIX: crontab
• crontab(5) manual page
• Kubernetes docs: CronJob
• GitHub Actions docs: schedule event
• systemd.time(7): calendar events
• AWS docs: EventBridge Scheduler cron expressions

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Frequently asked questions