Change Eclipse JRE Path

This tutorial will show how to change Eclipse JRE path, in order to force Eclipse to use the specified JVM.
This is a very useful approach if you need your Eclipse running over a different JVM than the one specified on your PATH environment variable, or even if this variable absent. Also, it is going to help you with portable JREs and to solve the No Java Virtual machine was found error.

In your Eclipse folder, you should have a file named eclipse.ini, which looks like the following on a fresh downloaded Eclipse Mars:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.100.v20150511-1540.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.300.v20150602-1417
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.appendVmargs
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.7
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m

Note the highlighted line which specify -vmargs, we must specify our JRE path above it, otherwise it is not going to work.

To specify our JRE, we add the following on the said location:

-vm
<your_java_home>\bin\javaw.exe

And here’s the modified version of the eclipse.ini file pointing to a different JVM on my machine:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.100.v20150511-1540.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.300.v20150602-1417
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.appendVmargs
-vm
C:\Users\bgasparotto\Documents\Java\jdk1.8.0_60\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.7
-Xms256m
-Xmx1024m

Hope it helps. Cya!