The PHP cron expression parser can parse a CRON expression, determine if it is due to run, calculate the next run date of the expression, and calculate the previous run date of the expression. You can calculate dates far into the future or past by skipping n number of matching dates.

The parser can handle increments of ranges (e.g. */12, 2-59/3), intervals (e.g. 0-9), lists (e.g. 1,2,3), W to find the nearest weekday for a given day of the month, L to find the last day of the month, L to find the last given weekday of a month, and hash (#) to find the nth weekday of a given month.

More information about this fork can be found in the blog post here. tl;dr - v2.0.0 is a major breaking change, and @dragonmantank can better take care of the project in a separate fork.

Installing

Add the dependency to your project:

composer require dragonmantank/cron-expression

Usage

<?php

require_once '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Works with predefined scheduling definitions
$cron = new Cron\CronExpression('@daily');
$cron->isDue();
echo $cron->getNextRunDate()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
echo $cron->getPreviousRunDate()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Works with complex expressions
$cron = new Cron\CronExpression('3-59/15 6-12 */15 1 2-5');
echo $cron->getNextRunDate()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Calculate a run date two iterations into the future
$cron = new Cron\CronExpression('@daily');
echo $cron->getNextRunDate(null, 2)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Calculate a run date relative to a specific time
$cron = new Cron\CronExpression('@monthly');
echo $cron->getNextRunDate('2010-01-12 00:00:00')->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');

CRON Expressions

A CRON expression is a string representing the schedule for a particular command to execute. The parts of a CRON schedule are as follows:

*    *    *    *    *
-    -    -    -    -
|    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    |
|    |    |    |    +----- day of week (0 - 7) (Sunday=0 or 7)
|    |    |    +---------- month (1 - 12)
|    |    +--------------- day of month (1 - 31)
|    +-------------------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------------------- min (0 - 59)

This library also supports a few macros:

@yearly, @annually - Run once a year, midnight, Jan. 1 - 0 0 1 1 *
@monthly - Run once a month, midnight, first of month - 0 0 1 * *
@weekly - Run once a week, midnight on Sun - 0 0 * * 0
@daily, @midnight - Run once a day, midnight - 0 0 * * *
@hourly - Run once an hour, first minute - 0 * * * *

Requirements

PHP 7.2+
PHPUnit is required to run the unit tests
Composer is required to run the unit tests

Projects that Use cron-expression

Part of the Laravel Framework
Available as a Symfony Bundle - setono/cron-expression-bundle
Framework agnostic, PHP-based job scheduler - Crunz

.NET Framework

Project Request

ProjectC

Vehicle Maintenance

Movie Navigator

Customers Exchange

ATM

.NET Core

Mail Daemon

Custom

Buns of code

PHP

Mediabox

Loan Castle

Content Management

Laravel

Phone Check

Frontend

Forex Wall

Business projects

Certification Center

Amerikas Auto

Pet projects

Geolocation Assistant

Web Dynamics

Blackball

Good old times

DOS Clock

BrainOut

Airport Administrator