Kubernetes - Setting System property

I have a Java application which uses JAAS authentication and hence it needs a below system property.

-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/jaas/conf/client_jaas.conf

We set this system property in our startup script through JAVA_OPTS.

JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Djava.security.auth.login.config=/jaas/conf/client_jaas.conf"

I am trying to move this app to Kubernetes and setting as below.

"containers": [
          {
            "env": [
              {
                "name": "JAVA_OPTS",
                "value": "-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/jaas/conf/client_jaas.conf"
              },

But, I am getting the below error in my application logs.

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not find a 'appClient' entry in the JAAS configuration. System property 'java.security.auth.login.config' is not set

Is there any other way to set this?

I don't know if this is a related problem to the following: JAVA_OPTS is not an out-of-the-box environment variable, but a convention. If you take a look at this example Dockerfile

FROM openjdk:8-jre-alpine

ENV SPRING_OUTPUT_ANSI_ENABLED=ALWAYS \
    JHIPSTER_SLEEP=0 \
    JAVA_OPTS=""

# add directly the war
ADD *.war /app.war

EXPOSE 8081
CMD echo "The application will start in ${JHIPSTER_SLEEP}s..." && \
    sleep ${JHIPSTER_SLEEP} && \
    java ${JAVA_OPTS} -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom -jar /app.war

you see that the JAVA_OPTS is first defined as a variable and later been used for the java command itself. With this configuration, you are then able to pass custom java options using ENV vars.

So I assume you did everything correctly in kubernetes, but the underlying docker image does not handle it properly