CronCraft is a lightweight, developer-friendly .NET SDK that converts cron expressions into human-readable strings — with support for localization, formatting, and time zone awareness — no configuration files required.
CronCraft is designed for clarity, speed, and minimal setup.
Whether you're building a web app, a CLI tool, a Windows Service, or a background worker — just create a CronSettings object, and you're good to go.
❝ No dependency injection required. No appsettings. Just clean, functional cron parsing. ❞
- 🔄 Converts standard or Quartz cron expressions to plain language
- 🌍 Localized day-of-week formatting (
short,full,single, or custom) - 🕘 Time zone adjustment (optional)
- 🔧 Fully configurable via
CronSettingsobject - 💉 Optional dependency injection registration with
AddCronCraft - 📦 Lightweight, zero-dependency core logic
dotnet add package CronCraftusingCronCraft.Models;usingCronCraft.Extensions;stringcronExpression="0 0 * * *";// Every day at midnightvarsettings=newCronSettings{Language="en",DayNameFormat="short",TimeFormat="HH:mm"// Optional: 24-hour output (default: "hh:mm tt")};// Without timezonestringhumanReadable=cronExpression.ToHumanReadable(settings);Console.WriteLine("🔁 CronCraft Expression Translator");Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");Console.WriteLine($"🧾 Cron Expression: {cronExpression}");Console.WriteLine($"📖 Human Readable: {humanReadable}");Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");Console.WriteLine("Press Enter to exit...");// With TimeZoneTimeZoneInfotimeZone=TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("W. Central Africa Standard Time");humanReadable=cronExpression.ToHumanReadable(settings,timeZone);Console.WriteLine($"📖 Human Readable (Local TZ): {humanReadable}");Console.ReadLine();For ASP.NET Core and generic host applications, register CronCraft through
IServiceCollection:
usingCronCraft.Extensions;builder.Services.AddCronCraft(settings =>{settings.Language="en";settings.DayNameFormat="short";});Then inject CronCraftService where it is needed:
publicclassMyScheduler(CronCraftServicecronCraft){publicstringDescribe(stringexpression)=>cronCraft.Convert(expression);}Expected Output:
🔁 CronCraft Expression Translator
-----------------------------------
🧾 Cron Expression: 0 0 * * *
📖 Human Readable: Every day at 12:00 AM
-----------------------------------
📖 Human Readable (Local TZ): Every day at 01:00 AM
Press Enter to exit...
full: e.g. "Sunday"short: e.g. "Sun"single: e.g. "S"custom: fully user-defined viaDictionary<string, string>
- English (
en) - Spanish (
es) - French (
fr) - German (
de) - Portuguese (
pt) - Italian (
it) - Dutch (
nl) - Simplified Chinese (
zh) - Japanese (
ja) - Easily extendable via custom mappings
Esanju Babatunde
GitHub · LinkedIn
CronCraft includes a BenchmarkDotNet project to measure parsing performance across expression types and languages.
Run the benchmarks:
cd CronCraft.Benchmarks
dotnet run -c Release -- --filter *Sample results (Apple M-series, .NET 8):
| Benchmark | Mean | Allocated |
|---|---|---|
Simple (*/5 * * * *) | ~1 µs | minimal |
With day list (0 */2 * * 1,2,3,4,5) | ~2 µs | minimal |
| Quartz 6-part | ~1.5 µs | minimal |
| With timezone | ~2 µs | minimal |
| Spanish | ~1.5 µs | minimal |
Tip: add
--filter *Simple*to run a single benchmark by name.
Contributions are welcome! If you'd like to:
- Fix a bug
- Improve performance
- Add support for a new language
- Refactor or improve documentation
Feel free to open a Pull Request or start a Discussion.
Before contributing:
- Fork the repo
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b feature/your-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -m 'Add your message') - Push to the branch (
git push origin feature/your-feature) - Open a pull request 🚀
If you're not sure where to start, check the issues or the CONTRIBUTING guide for a full list of open tasks.
Let's make cron expressions human again! ❤️
This project is licensed under the MIT License.
See the LICENSE file for details.