node-cron — Node.js cron syntax & examples

import cron from 'node-cron';

// Every weekday at 09:00 New York time
cron.schedule(
  '0 9 * * 1-5',
  () => {
    console.log('Tick');
  },
  { timezone: 'America/New_York' }
);

// Every 30 seconds (6-field with seconds at the front)
cron.schedule('*/30 * * * * *', () => {
  console.log('Half-minute tick');
});

The 6-field syntax with seconds works in node-cron, but not in standard 5-field cron. Pin to 5-field if you need to port the schedule to other systems.

const task = cron.schedule('*/5 * * * *', () => {
  pollExternalApi();
});

// Pause during a maintenance window
task.stop();

// Resume after maintenance
task.start();

// Tear down completely
task.destroy();

if (!cron.validate(userProvidedExpression)) {
  throw new Error(`Invalid cron expression: ${userProvidedExpression}`);
}

cron.schedule(userProvidedExpression, runUserJob);

Use cron.validate when accepting cron expressions from users — invalid input causes node-cron to throw at scheduling time, which is harder to handle than a proactive validation step.

• No L / W / # / ? — for last-day-of-month use a runtime check or a different library.
• Process-bound — when the Node process exits, the schedule stops. For durable scheduling use a queue (BullMQ, Agenda) or a system cron.
• Single-process — if you horizontally scale your Node app, every replica will fire the cron. Add a leader-election layer or move the schedule to one singleton instance.
• Long callbacks — node-cron does not serialize concurrent runs. Wrap with a mutex or use maxConcurrency options from a queue library.