How to set environment variable or system property in spring tests?

You can initialize the System property in a static initializer:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath:whereever/context.xml")
public class TestWarSpringContext {

    static {
        System.setProperty("myproperty", "foo");
    }

}

The static initializer code will be executed before the spring application context is initialized.

The right way to do this, starting with Spring 4.1, is to use a @TestPropertySource annotation.

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath:whereever/context.xml")
@TestPropertySource(properties = {"myproperty = foo"})
public class TestWarSpringContext {
    ...    
}

See @TestPropertySource in the Spring docs and Javadocs.

One can also use a test ApplicationContextInitializer to initialize a system property:

public class TestApplicationContextInitializer implements ApplicationContextInitializer<ConfigurableApplicationContext>
{
    @Override
    public void initialize(ConfigurableApplicationContext applicationContext)
    {
        System.setProperty("myproperty", "value");
    }
}

and then configure it on the test class in addition to the Spring context config file locations:

@ContextConfiguration(initializers = TestApplicationContextInitializer.class, locations = "classpath:whereever/context.xml", ...)
@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
public class SomeTest
{
...
}

This way code duplication can be avoided if a certain system property should be set for all the unit tests.