How do I set GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME?

Whenever I open an existing Android project in Android Studio for the first time, Android Studio sets the Gradle JDK to GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME which points to the Android Studio's built-in JDK. I would like GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME to point to a different JDK location (the same that I use in my JAVA_HOME and the one I have in PATH) but I can't figure out how to do it.

It's annoying that whenever I open a project I get a wrong JDK by default and I must open the settings and choose the one under JAVA_HOME manually. I would like Android Studio to pick up my custom default automatically instead.

This documentation says that:

GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME: uses the java.home property in the .gradle/config.properties file which defaults to the JetBrains Runtime.

I hoped that I could change it globally somewhere and tried creating $HOME/.gradle/config.properties and putting java.home there but it doesn't work. Does it mean Android Studio respects only the config.properties file in the project's .gradle directory?

It looks like Android Studio only uses the project's .gradle/config.properties.

You can attest this by deleting the java.home property from the project's config.properties file and selecting the GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME macro on Android Studio. Once you try to build the project you will encounter the following error:

Invalid Gradle JDK configuration found. Undefined java.home on the project gradle/config.properties file when using the gradleJvm #GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME macro.

This error occurs even when we define java.home property on our home's .gradle/config.properties.

This Android documentation says:

Note: In most cases, we recommend using GRADLE_LOCAL_JAVA_HOME, which is the default for newly created projects. This lets you define a project-specific JDK without opening the project first.

As said above "[...] define a project-specific JDK [...]". That is why we cannot override it.

You can read a little bit more about this macro here.