REST Call to Resource in Dropwizard/Jersey and UTF-8 works only on dev machine - utf-8

Question

We're using dropwizard 0.7.1 which comes with jetty 9.0.7 and the jersey http client 1.18.1 (yes, it's old...). The os is linux, we're using Java 1.8.
I'm running an integration test locally inside eclipse, which makes a rest call using jersey to a dropwizard application running inside a vagrant box.
One of the tests should verify if I can send non-latin characters to the server.
I'm sending the string "Владимир Արման" inside a String field of a POJO using jersey:
req.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON + "; charset=utf-8")//
.post(ClientResponse.class, user);
The resource I'm sending this too looks like this:
#Path("/users")
#Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON + "; charset=utf-8")
#Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON + "; charset=utf-8")
public class UserServiceResource{
[...]
#POST
public Response createUser(UserCreate user) {...}
(you see we're both on the client and on the server side enforcing the utf-8 charset, which in my opinion, should actually not be necessary?)
This works perfectly locally, the name arrives correctly.
On jenkins, however, this does not work, I only receive "??????" in the service instead of the correct characters. In the log of the client that posts the pojo I still see the correct characters.
The setup is quite similar: jenkins builds a vagrant box, and then runs the tests using maven against this box (the integration test code runs outside the vagrant box, the service runs inside vagrant).
Jenkins uses maven, but when running the integration test locally using maven, it still works fine.
The vagrant box I'm using locally is also build and provisioned by jenkins, in a different job.
We are now trying to investigate if the environment settings might be slightly different, already tried setting
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
MAVEN_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"
but that didn't help.
What mainly puzzles me is that I would expect to work this under any environment settings, as we explicitly enforce UTF-8.
Are there know issues how the environment overrides the encodings set in the client and the server?

Answer 1

This problem just ate my soul. The root issue ended up being with the JDBC configuration. Originally my config looked like this:
database:
driverClass: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
user: ...
password: ...
url: jdbc:mysql://...
properties:
charSet: UTF-8
hibernate.dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
maxWaitForConnection: 1s
validationQuery: "/* DropWizard Health Check */ SELECT 1"
minSize: 5
maxSize: 25
checkConnectionWhileIdle: false
checkConnectionOnBorrow: true
The solution was to update the properties block to define a characterEncoding and useUnicode property. Like this:
properties:
charSet: UTF-8
characterEncoding: UTF-8
useUnicode: true
hibernate.dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
Updating my YAML config, in addition to adding a charset parameter to the Content-Type header, fixed the issue for me.