Hooksbase

Glossary · Product

Cron expression

The five-field UTC schedule string that determines when a scheduled webhook fires.

Product

What is a cron expression?

A cron expression is the schedule string attached to a webhook that determines when scheduled ingest fires. Hooksbase uses the standard five-field format:

*      *     *            *       *
minute hour  day-of-month month   day-of-week
(0-59) (0-23) (1-31)      (1-12)  (0-6)

Examples: 0 * * * * fires hourly on the hour, */15 * * * * every fifteen minutes, and 0 3 * * 1 at 03:00 on Mondays.

Always UTC

Expressions are evaluated in UTC. There is no per-schedule timezone and no daylight-saving adjustment, so convert your intended local time before writing the expression. A job meant for 09:00 in a summer-time zone will drift by an hour relative to local clocks twice a year unless you account for it.

What the schedule tracks

Alongside the expression, each schedule stores an optional name, an optional payload template, a status of active or paused, and the lastFiredAt and nextFireAt timestamps in Unix milliseconds — which is the fastest way to confirm a schedule is actually live.

Frequently asked questions

What timezone does Hooksbase evaluate cron expressions in?

Always UTC. There is no per-schedule timezone and no daylight-saving adjustment, so convert your intended local time before writing the expression — otherwise a job meant for 09:00 local drifts by an hour against local clocks twice a year.

How do you check that a schedule is actually firing?

Read lastFiredAt and nextFireAt on the schedule, both Unix millisecond timestamps. Together with the active or paused status they are the fastest confirmation that a schedule is live.

What is Hooksbase?

Hooksbase is event infrastructure for AI agents. It ingests events over four channels — HTTP, email, HTML form, and scheduled cron — verifies them, routes them by rule, runs versioned Automations in the event path, and delivers them to HTTP and cloud destinations (AWS SQS, AWS EventBridge, GCP Pub/Sub, and S3-compatible storage) with retries, strict ordering, Standard Webhooks-compatible signing, deterministic replay, and a dead-letter path. It is a hosted service, runs on Cloudflare Workers, is operated at hooksbase.com, and is not affiliated with — and shares no code or ownership with — other similarly named webhook, hook, or tunnelling tools.

Related terms

Back to glossary