Run a Cron Job Every 15 Minutes

Executes the job every 15 minutes (4 times per hour).

crontab -e

*/15****

$*/15 * * * *

Field Breakdown

*/15

Minute

0–59

*

Hour

0–23

*

Day of Month

1–31

*

Month

1–12

*

Day of Week

0–6

How It Works

The expression */15 * * * * fires at :00, :15, :30, and :45 of each hour. Four runs per hour provides a good balance between timeliness and resource efficiency, making it a popular choice for report generation, email digest processing, and external API polling. This 15-minute cadence is widely used in enterprise environments where near-real-time processing is needed but per-minute execution would be wasteful.

The step value of 15 divides the 60-minute hour into four equal segments. Starting from minute 0, the job fires at 0, 15, 30, and 45. This creates a predictable quarter-hour rhythm. Combined with wildcards in all other fields, it runs 96 times per day across all hours.

Platform Usage

Add to Linux crontab: "*/15 * * * * python3 /app/generate_report.py". In GitHub Actions, use "on: schedule: - cron: '*/15 * * * *'" for periodic CI checks. Celery beat in Python accepts this format for periodic task scheduling.