Cron: Every Friday
0 0 * * 5 fires once a week, every Friday at midnight — day-of-week 5 in standard cron. Friday schedules are common for end-of-week reports and pre-weekend cleanup, though Friday is also famously the day most teams avoid for risky deploys.
0 0 * * 5
Examples & Variations
Common Mistakes
- Scheduling risky, hard-to-reverse automation (deploys, migrations, mass data changes) for Friday — if it fails late in the day, the team has the least time to respond before the weekend.
- Running a heavy end-of-week job right at midnight Friday, when it might make more sense earlier in the day while people are still around to notice failures.
- Assuming Friday reports capture the full week when they run before business close — a midnight Friday run misses anything that happens during Friday business hours.
Best Practices
- The well-known 'no Friday deploys' convention exists for a reason — reserve Friday cron schedules for read-only or easily-reversible operations where possible.
- For a true end-of-week report, schedule it for Friday evening or Saturday morning rather than Friday midnight, so it captures the full week including Friday's own activity.
- If a Friday job absolutely must be failure-prone (e.g. a backup), ensure alerting is active over the weekend so a failure doesn't sit unnoticed until Monday.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What number represents Friday in cron?
- 5. Standard cron's day-of-week field runs 0 (Sunday) through 6 (Saturday), placing Friday at index 5.
- Why do so many teams avoid Friday deployments?
- If something breaks late Friday, the people needed to fix it may already be offline for the weekend, extending the time an issue stays live. It's an operational convention, not a cron limitation.
- How do I schedule a report that covers the full week including Friday?
- Run it after Friday business hours close, e.g. 0 18 * * 5 for 6 PM Friday, or push it to Saturday/Monday morning if Friday evening activity still matters.
Related Tools
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Cron Examples Library
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Cron: Every Thursday
The cron expression for every Thursday is 0 0 * * 4, running weekly at midnight. See Thursday scheduling examples and best practices.
Cron: Every Saturday
The cron expression for every Saturday is 0 0 * * 6, running weekly at midnight. See Saturday scheduling examples and best practices.
Cron: Every Sunday
The cron expression for every Sunday is 0 0 * * 0, running weekly at midnight. See Sunday scheduling examples and best practices.