How do I force a Spring Boot JVM into UTC time zone?

I think you can set your application's timezone on your application level. I think this link will help you. https://www.onlinetutorialspoint.com/spring-boot/how-to-set-spring-boot-settimezone.html

So What you need to do is adding "@PostConstruct" annotation to the main class where "@SpringBootApplication" annotation is located, and add timezone setting method there. Here is an example.

@SpringBootApplication
public class HellotimezoneApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(HellotimezoneApplication.class, args);
    }

    @PostConstruct
    public void init(){
      // Setting Spring Boot SetTimeZone
      TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    }

}

Hope this can help you!

You can configure the timezone with a class annotated with the @Configuration annotation. You can put it anywhere in your project. I typically house all classes that fit under this category in a package called config. Make sure you add the @PostConstruct annotation to the method that is actually setting the timezone.

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;

@Configuration
public class LocaleConfig {

    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {

        TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));

        System.out.println("Date in UTC: " + new Date().toString());
    }
}

See the original article

More options in case your application is running under linux:

Set TZ environment variable

See "In POSIX systems, a user can specify the time zone by means of the TZ environment variable" (https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html).

This option is especially useful in any cloud environment.

Symlink /etc/locatime

I.e. in my local system /etc/locatime symlinks to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin:

➜ ls -l /etc/localtime  
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 22. Jan 23:01 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin

You can easily change the symbolic link with ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime, the possible values can be found within /usr/share/zoneinfo/.

This option can also be used in many cloud environments by mounting a hostvolume, see kubernetes timezone in POD with command and argument.

Use spring-boot.run.jvmArguments property if you want to pass JVM options from Maven Spring Boot Plugin to forked Spring Boot application:

<properties>
  <spring-boot.run.jvmArguments>-Duser.timezone=UTC</spring-boot.run.jvmArguments>
</properties>

This is be equivalent to command line syntax:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.jvmArguments="-Duser.timezone=UTC"

or when running a fully packaged Spring Boot application:

java -Duser.timezone=UTC -jar app.jar