Cron Job Every Day at Midnight

The expression

0 0 * * *  /path/to/command
@daily     /path/to/command

Read it field by field: minute 0, hour 0, any day of the month, any month, any day of the week. That is exactly 00:00 every day. The first 0 is the minute and the second 0 is the hour — getting that order wrong is the most common beginner error.

Run daily at another time

To shift the daily run, change the hour (and optionally the minute):

• 0 3 * * * — every day at 3:00am.
• 30 6 * * * — every day at 6:30am.
• 0 22 * * * — every day at 10:00pm.
• 15 2 * * 1-5 — at 2:15am on weekdays only.

Why midnight can be risky

Midnight is the default for countless jobs, so 00:00 tends to be the busiest moment on a server — every cron task firing at once. On top of that, daylight-saving transitions can make the midnight hour repeat or be skipped, which means a strictly-midnight job may run twice or not at all on those two nights a year.

For these reasons, experienced operators often pick an off-peak, DST-safe time such as 30 2 * * * (2:30am). It avoids the crowd at midnight and sidesteps the ambiguous hour around the spring and autumn clock changes.

Confirm before you deploy

Paste your daily expression into the generator. It translates the line to plain English and lists the next several run dates in your local time zone, so you can be certain the job fires at the time you intended — not twelve hours off because the minute and hour were swapped.