Run a Cron Job Every Hour

Setting minute to 0 and leaving hour as * creates an hourly schedule. The job executes at HH:00 every hour, 24 times per day. Hourly crons are standard for report generation, data aggregation, billing cycles, and system maintenance. This is one of the most commonly used cron schedules in production systems, offering a good balance between timeliness and system load.

By fixing the minute field to 0 and leaving the hour field as a wildcard (*), the job matches at the start of every hour: 00:00, 01:00, 02:00, and so on through 23:00. The day, month, and weekday fields are all wildcards, so the schedule repeats every single day without exception.