Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)
Hi HN!
I built NaturalCron because I was tired of writing and debugging CRON syntax like:
/5 * * 5
Now you can write something human-readable in .NET:
var expression = new NaturalCronExpression("every 5 minutes on friday");
Or use a Fluent Builder for strong typing and IDE support:
var expression = NaturalCronExpressionBuilder .Every().Minutes(5) .On(DayOfWeek.Friday) .Build();
Great for: - Code-based scheduling in .NET apps - Overriding schedules from configs or databases - Displaying easy-to-read rules in UIs
NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/NaturalCron GitHub: https://github.com/hugoj0s3/NaturalCron
Would love your feedback on syntax, builder design, and what features you'd like to see next!
The goal is provide a format that’s user-friendly while still being precise enough for developers and systems to rely on. It’s especially useful for things like configurable schedules in apps, admin dashboards, or any context where end users and developers need to share the same language.
I appreciated the feedback and comments.
At the end of the day, anyone using cron-type things should just learn cron syntax, it’s really not that difficult and there are a number of websites that you can use to assist or spot-check your work.
I’m always incredibly resistant to “human readable” for things like this because there is just too much ambiguity.
Really? Does “Every day between Monday and Friday” include Monday and Friday? One could think the days between Monday and Friday are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Why people don’t just learn cron syntax is beyond me.
Because it looks like line noise, is unreadable to anybody not a UNIX/Linux admin, and is a standard in the same sense that the directory separator is the backslash on the majority of deployed desktops and servers.
More importantly: It’s also not extensible without being completely changed, which makes it a poor design.
Fluent builders can be trivially expanded to support new capabilities without breaking existing code or configuration.
Cron’s syntax was likely a quick and nasty thing thrown together by some student at Berkeley or wherever in the stone ages of computing. We shouldn’t be bound by these accidents of history in the same way we shouldn’t keep using Roman numerals these days.
Fair enough but let’s please not replace it with something where the literal first example in the GitHub read me is ambiguous.
Maybe the better question to ponder is why is it something that needs explicit learning. It's a basic task scheduler.
The *nix format hell in general drives me insane. Immensely glad for the recent-ish trend of lots of applications at least slowly adopting JSON and others as both config and output options.
You still have to learn what exactly this sort of software can understand and that is, imo, no less of a time/effort needed to learn cron.