Google app engine - local development server timezone - google-app-engine

Question

I understood from the GAE documentation that the production server timezone is always UTC. While developing locally, the server timezone is set to CET. Is there a way to force the local development server to also run on UTC ?
The development server is running on Mac OS.
Thanks,
Hugues

Answer 1

jut found the answer. In order to set the server timezone, just go in Eclipse, "Run configurations", then "VM arguments" and add the following "-Duser.timezone=UTC".
This will set the server timezone to the value you want (UTC) in this case. This is really handy as Google App Engine production will always run UTC whereas the development server (at least in my case) was running with local timezone. The net effect was that I had a different behavior between dev and prod.
Hugues

Answer 2

Well you can use this while saving a date value to your datastore to convert to your specific timezone.
DateFormat utcFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(patternString);
utcFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
DateFormat indianFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(patternString);
utcFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Asia/Kolkata"));
Date timestamp = utcFormat.parse(inputString);
String output = indianFormat.format(timestamp);

Answer 3

GAE devServer uses local Timezone by default.
I use this code to force it to UTC:
boolean isDevEnvironment = SystemProperty.environment.value() == SystemProperty.Environment.Value.Development;
if (isDevEnvironment) {
TimeZone.setDefault(DateTimeZone.UTC.toTimeZone());
DateTimeZone.setDefault(DateTimeZone.UTC);
}
You need to run it once, in the very during server startup and initialization.