KB-1228 "Appian requires that the JVM timezone be set to GMT" error thrown when starting up JBoss

Symptoms

JBoss fails to deploy Appian with the following error, seen in the application server log:

ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[jboss.web].[default-host].[/suite]] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 61) JBWEB000287: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class com.appiancorp.common.config.ConfigurationLoader: com.appiancorp.common.config.FatalConfigurationException: com.appiancorp.suiteapi.common.exceptions.AppianException: Aborting application server start up. Appian requires that the JVM timezone be set to GMT. Use -Duser.timezone=GMT when starting the JVM. (APNX-1-4285-001)
    at ...

Cause

Appian requires the application server JVM’s timezone to be set to GMT for the successful deployment of the application. Setting it to any other timezone would cause the deployment to fail with the above error.

Action

For Windows, edit standalone.conf.bat present under <JBOSS_HOME>\bin and set the following variable:

set JAVA_TIMEZONE=GMT

For Linux, edit standalone.conf present under <JBOSS_HOME>/bin and set the following variable:

JAVA_TIMEZONE=GMT

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian.