How to make Jenkins CI use Local time instead of UTC on debian squeeze

Question

I have a Jenkins-ci installation on a debian squeeze.

Current default time zone: 'America/Toronto'
Local time is now:      Mon Jul  9 16:00:57 EDT 2012.
Universal Time is now:  Mon Jul  9 20:00:57 UTC 2012.

In the /etc/default/rcS file i have :

UTC=no

Unfortunately this is not working, In the system information of jenkins:

user.timezone   Etc/UTC

I searched for a few hour.. unfortunately could not find a fix any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank for your time

Answer 1

You need to pass in your required value of user.timezone as a JVM argument when you start Jenkins. The Java command line will look something like:

$JAVA_HOME/java -Duser.timezone="America/Toronto" [other JVM parameters] $JENKINS_HOME/jenkins.jar

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the Debian installation, but the JVM parameters should either be defined in the /etc/init.d/jenkins script or in a properties file that is referenced from that script.

Answer 2

Three years later, I found several gotchas getting this to work. So, I'll elaborate upon the accepted answer (which is correct) and add a complete answer for CentOS.

---

Gotcha #1: The Jenkins settings to change

The current Jenkins documentation on changing time zone says to define user.timezone or org.apache.commons.jelly.tags.fmt.timeZone. But, I have found that both are necessary. The jelly one works for Jenkins proper and some plugins, while the user one works for other plugins.

---

Gotcha #2: The OS settings to update

For CentOS in the Eastern US, edit /etc/sysconfig/jenkins to:

JENKINS_JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dorg.apache.commons.jelly.tags.fmt.timeZone=America/New_York -Duser.timezone=America/New_York"
JENKINS_ARGS=""

If you put these -D settings into JENKINS_ARGS, it won't work.

---

Gotcha #3: Restarting

You have to restart from the command line, the entire service. Simply doing a Jenkins safe restart is not sufficient. So:

sudo service jenkins restart

When you've done all this, check that both time zone settings match in your Jenkins system information panel: http://jenkins.example.com/systemInfo

Answer 3

In Ubuntu 14.04, none of the above solutions worked for me, but I ended up running the following command, which pulls up an interface where the timezone can be changed from the default (none selected) to something more specific:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

First, you're prompted to select the continent, (i.e. America, Asia, etc) and then the city, which in my case resulted in "Asia/Kolkata" for the IST timezone in India.

See UbuntuTime - Using the Command Line.

In addition, after changing the timezone, I restarted Jenkins:

sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins stop sudo /etc/init.d/jenkins start

and then verified that the time was in local IST time. In http://<yourservername>/systemInfo, as provided by user bishop, under the System Properties section, for the "user.timezone" property, I now see "Asia/Kolkata" as its value.

Answer 4

If this relates to the execution of jobs based on a cron schedule (ie Build Periodically), you can set you Time Zone in the cron schedule on a per job basis:

TZ=Europe/Dublin
0 7 * * 1-5

Answer 5

If you are running Jenkins in Apache Tomcat, add these to <Apache-Tomcat-Dir>/conf/catalina.properties:

user.timezone=America/New_York
org.apache.commons.jelly.tags.fmt.timeZone=America/New_York

Both are needed.

Answer 6

For jenkins v2.73.3 on CentOS 7.1 (in docker) we have found you have to both

1. set the OS timezone e.g. 'ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Jakarta /etc/localtime' and

2. under Manage Jenkins set the timezone e.g. 'Asia/Jakarta'.

After a regular jenkins:xxxx/restart the new timezone is used.

Answer 7

Adding an answer to cover the situation when running jenkins in a docker container under CentOS. In this case options might not be set in /etc/sysconfig/jenkins (depending on your jenkins service start scripts). A jenkins.sh script is used to start the jenkins service. This jenkins.sh script is similar to that used by the jenkins-inside-docker project so this answer is hopefully useful to any jenkins in docker projects deriving from that.

https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker/blob/master/jenkins.sh

Below we get TZ e.g. Europe/Dublin and pass -e $TZ to docker run so that we can have a script which writes that to /etc/timezone or links /etc/localtime but the important thing is passing these two arguments in JAVA_OPTS: "-Dorg.apache.commons.jelly.tags.fmt.timeZone=$TZ -Duser.timezone=$TZ". The jenkins.sh script passes these to the command-line which starts the jenkins process.

On docker host when creating the container example of docker run command:

TZFILE=$(readlink -f /etc/localtime)
TZ=$(echo $TZFILE|sed s#.*zoneinfo\/##)
TZARG=" -e $TZ "

ID=$(docker run $TARG \
-d \
--user=jenkins \
--name jenkins-${USER} \
--restart always \
-p $HOST_IP:$JENKINS_PORT:${JENKINS_PORT_INTERNAL} \
-p $HOST_IP:$JENKINS_SLAVE_PORT:50000 \
$TZARG \
--env JAVA_OPTS="-Dhudson.Main.development=true \
    -Dhudson.footerURL=$JENKINS_URL \
    -Dorg.apache.commons.jelly.tags.fmt.timeZone=$TZ -Duser.timezone=$TZ \
    -Xms800M -Xmx800M -Xmn400M \
    " \
--env JENKINS_HOME=/var/jenkins_home \
-v $JENKINS_DIR:/var/jenkins_home \
$VARGS \
$ADDITIONALARGS \
$IMAGE \
/bin/tini /usr/local/bin/jenkins.sh \
)
echo "INFO: container ID:$ID" |tee JENKINS.CONTAINER.ID

Options were passed in docker variable in docker run command and then passed to jenkins start command.