Run a cron job every 6 hours
“At minute 0 past every 6th hour.”
Four evenly-spaced runs at 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, 18:00. This is the workhorse cadence for 'a few times a day' operations — frequent enough that a failure gets retried the same day, rare enough that heavyweight work stays affordable.
0 */6 * * *Next 5 runs
Computing from your local clock…
Field by field
| Field | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Minute | 0 | exactly 0 |
| Hour | */6 | every 6 starting from 0 |
| Day of month | * | every value |
| Month | * | every value |
| Day of week | * | every value |
Typical uses
- Database maintenance (ANALYZE, statistics refresh)
- Pulling upstream datasets published a few times daily
- Rotating credentials or refreshing signed URLs
Related schedules
Need a different schedule? Build and test any cron expression with live explanation and next-run preview, or read the complete cron syntax guide.