croniter

croniter takes a standard (or extended) cron expression and a starting datetime, then walks forward or backward to the exact moments the schedule fires. It’s the parsing and iteration engine underneath most Python scheduling code: task queues computing the next run for a periodic job, cron-expression validators in web UIs, and dashboards that need to show “next 5 runs” for a saved schedule.

Beyond the standard five-field Unix syntax, it supports optional seconds and year fields, last-day-of-month (l), nearest-weekday (W), Nth-weekday-of-month (#), hash-based expressions for spreading load across a fleet (H / @hourly-style), configurable AND/OR semantics between day-of-month and day-of-week, and DST-aware iteration when given timezone-aware datetimes.

What You Get

• A croniter class that wraps a cron expression and a start time, exposing get_next() / get_prev() to step through matching datetimes or Unix timestamps
• croniter.is_valid() and croniter.expand() classmethods for validating and introspecting a cron string before scheduling it, including opt-in strict=True cross-field validation (rejects impossible dates like Feb 31)
• Extended syntax beyond POSIX cron: optional seconds and year fields, l (last day of month), W/nW (nearest weekday), # (Nth weekday of month), and hash-based expressions (H, @hourly with a hash_id) for staggering many jobs’ fire times
• day_or and implement_cron_bug flags to control whether day-of-month and day-of-week combine with OR (POSIX default) or AND (fcron-style), including reproducing a known vixie-cron quirk for compatibility
• Full timezone/DST awareness via zoneinfo, pytz, or dateutil.tz when a timezone-aware start_time is supplied
• croniter_range() helper and the iterator protocol (all_next()/all_prev()) for pulling a bounded or unbounded sequence of fire times directly in a for loop

Common Use Cases

• Computing a job’s next scheduled run inside a task queue or scheduler (Celery beat, Airflow, custom cron-like schedulers) without shelling out to system cron
• Validating user-submitted cron expressions in a web form or admin UI before saving a scheduled job
• Generating a preview list of upcoming run times (“next 5 executions”) for a saved schedule shown in a dashboard
• Staggering many periodic jobs across a time window using hash-based (H) expressions so they don’t all fire at the same instant
• Backfilling or auditing historical run times for a cron-scheduled job by iterating backward with get_prev()

Under The Hood

Architecture

croniter centers on a single croniter class (src/croniter/croniter.py, ~1,600 lines) that does two things: expand a cron expression string into per-field integer sets (_expand, feeding expanded, nth_weekday_of_month, and nearest_weekday state), then walk forward or backward from a timestamp field-by-field (proc_year/proc_month/proc_day_of_month/proc_day_of_week/proc_hour/proc_minute/proc_second closures inside _calc_next) until every field matches. A separate HashExpander class isolates the hash-based (H, @hourly) expansion logic from the core matching loop, keeping that fairly niche feature from complicating the primary code path. get_next/get_prev are thin wrappers over a shared _get_next, and all_next/all_prev turn that into a generator for the iterator protocol. The design is intentionally a single cohesive module rather than a layered system — appropriate for a focused parsing/iteration library where the field-matching state machine is the entire product.

Tech Stack

Pure Python (3.9+) with exactly one runtime dependency, python-dateutil, used for relativedelta (DST-safe date arithmetic) and tzutc/datetime_exists (DST-transition detection). No C extensions. Packaged with hatchling and uv-managed dependency groups (dev, lint, mypy, format, tox, release); tox.ini wires pytest+coverage for tests, ruff for lint and formatting, and mypy for type-checking into a single tox -e lint,mypy,fmt gate.

Code Quality

161 test functions spread across purpose-specific files (test_croniter.py, test_croniter_range.py, test_croniter_dst_repetition.py, test_croniter_hash.py, test_croniter_random.py, plus a test_croniter_speed.py performance check), run via pytest with branch coverage. A dedicated custom exception hierarchy (CroniterError, CroniterBadCronError, CroniterBadDateError, CroniterBadTypeRangeError, CroniterNotAlphaError, CroniterUnsupportedSyntaxError) replaces generic ValueErrors with specific, catchable failure modes. CI (cicd.yml) runs the lint/mypy/format gate plus the full test suite across Python 3.9 through 3.13, and a separate zizmor.yml workflow scans the GitHub Actions workflows themselves for supply-chain issues — a level of CI hygiene beyond most libraries this size.

API Design The public surface is deliberately small: construct a croniter(expr, start_time), then call get_next()/get_prev() repeatedly, or use it directly as an iterator. Sensible defaults (POSIX OR semantics, ret_type=float) mean the common case needs no keyword arguments, while power users get explicit opt-in flags (day_or, hash_id, implement_cron_bug, expand_from_start_time, second_at_beginning) for the less common behaviors. The README documents every extended feature with runnable, copy-pasteable examples rather than prose-only explanation, which keeps the learning curve low despite the fairly deep feature set (leap years, DST, hash expressions, AND/OR day semantics) hiding underneath.