Cron every day at midnight

0 0 * * * runs a job once a day at 00:00. The first two fields are minute 0 and hour 0, and the rest are *. @daily and @midnight are shortcuts for the same line in most crons.

Whose midnight?

The machine’s. Classic cron uses the system timezone, so a server on UTC runs this at 00:00 UTC, which is the evening before in the Americas. Set CRON_TZ=Europe/Warsaw at the top of a crontab (cronie and others support it), or use a scheduler with a timezone setting, to pin it to a local midnight.

When it fires

Checked at 09:58 UTC on October 14, the next five runs are:

Oct 15 00:00  Oct 16 00:00  Oct 17 00:00  Oct 18 00:00  Oct 19 00:00

Variations

30 2 * * *       every day at 02:30
0 0 * * 0        every Sunday at midnight (@weekly)
0 0 1 * *        the first of every month at midnight (@monthly)

The same schedule elsewhere

• GitHub Actions: cron: '0 0 * * *' runs at midnight UTC; midnight is a busy time, so a less round minute starts more reliably.
• Kubernetes CronJob: schedule: "0 0 * * *", with spec.timeZone: "America/New_York" for a local midnight.
• AWS EventBridge: cron(0 0 * * ? *), in UTC unless an EventBridge Scheduler schedule sets a timezone.
• systemd timer: OnCalendar=daily.
• Spring @Scheduled: 0 0 0 * * *, with zone = "..." to pick the timezone.