How to change the version of the 'default gradle wrapper' in IntelliJ IDEA?

The easiest way is to execute the following command from the command line (see Upgrading the Gradle Wrapper in documentation):

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 5.5

Moreover, you can use --distribution-type parameter with either bin or all value to choose a distribution type. Use all distribution type to avoid a hint from IntelliJ IDEA or Android Studio that will offer you to download Gradle with sources:

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version 5.5 --distribution-type all

Or you can create a custom wrapper task

task wrapper(type: Wrapper) {
    gradleVersion = '5.5'
}

and run ./gradlew wrapper.

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=5.4.1 --distribution-type=bin

https://gradle.org/install/#manually

To check:

 ./gradlew tasks

To input it without command:

go to-> gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties distribution url and change it to the updated zip version

output:

 ./gradlew tasks
Downloading https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-5.4.1-bin.zip
...................................................................................

Welcome to Gradle 5.4.1!

Here are the highlights of this release:
 - Run builds with JDK12
 - New API for Incremental Tasks
 - Updates to native projects, including Swift 5 support

For more details see https://docs.gradle.org/5.4.1/release-notes.html

Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster)

> Starting Daemon 

I just wanted to chime in that I hit this after updating Android Studio components.

What worked for me was to open gradle-wrapper.properties and update the gradle version used. As of now for my projects the line reads:

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.5-all.zip

Open the file gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties in your project. Change the version in the distributionUrl to use the version you want to use, e.g.,

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-2.10-all.zip