Cron every 10 minutes

Here is the line. Cron will run it, but it will not tell you the day it stops.

Add one ping to the end of the job.
Tell Uptimepage how often to expect it.
A missed ping opens an incident and alerts you by Slack, email, PagerDuty, SMS or webhook.

Free plan, no card. Opens the new-monitor form as a heartbeat check.

crontab -e

# .-------------- minute: 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 # | .--------- hour: any value # | | .------- day of month: any value # | | | .----- month: any value # | | | | .--- day of week: any value */10 * * * * /path/to/command # Every 10 minutes. That is 144 runs a day.

# next runs · your local time

# the same job, reporting in after each good run */10 * * * * /path/to/command && curl -fsS $URL # $URL is the ping URL of an Uptimepage heartbeat check

Add the line with crontab -e. Cron reads the server's time zone, which is often UTC.

same schedule elsewhere

Kubernetes CronJob

spec:
  schedule: "*/10 * * * *"

GitHub Actions

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '*/10 * * * *'

GitHub runs schedules in UTC unless you set a time zone, and can start them late when it is busy.

what to know

Six runs an hour, at :00, :10, :20, :30, :40 and :50. Written as a list, the same schedule is 0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * *.

For an offset, 5-59/10 * * * * runs at :05, :15, :25 and so on.

Cron starts each run on time whether or not the last one finished. If the job can outlast the interval, guard it with a lock such as flock -n /tmp/job.lock /path/to/command, so runs do not pile up.

For anything else, build it in the cron expression generator.

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