Oh My Zsh - Disable 'Would you like to check for updates' prompt

Question

Every time I open up terminal on a Mac I get the prompt

Would you like to check for updates?

I find it quite annoying. Anyway to stop it from doing so?

Selle

I am curious on how to make the update unattended instead of diabling it. – Mute

It's not only annoying. It just obliterated my original .zshrc file without even making a back-up. – Autocephalous

@Mute Three years later, here it is. Refer to my answer below. zstyle ':omz:update' mode auto – Boogiewoogie

Answer 1

You have to add DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE="true" on your .zshrc before the source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh line. By doing so, oh-my-zsh will just skip the update checking script.

Lavine

Answer 2

Set environment variable DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT=true to always reply Yes and automatically upgrade.

Set environment variable DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true to always reply No and never upgrade.

Simply add one of these in your ~/.zshrc somewhere before calling source $ZSH/oh-my-zsh.sh.

Porphyroid

Is there a way to make the prompt less frequent without disabling it? – Highclass

There is a UPDATE_ZSH_DAYS variable as well. That accepts an integer to specify a frequency in days. – Neckpiece

(as of this comment) All of these settings are now available in your ~/.zshrc (with comments!). – Eloign

DISABLE_UPDATE_PROMPT=true should be the default out of box. I probably will ditch ohmyzsh one day b/c of this anoyance. – Precincts

Answer 3

Deprecation in some other answers

Other answers might reference deprecated method for updating the settings.

As per OhMyZsh wiki, there is a section talking about Deprecated settings.

These settings are still supported but will be removed in a future version of Oh My Zsh. Migrate to the zstyle settings while you still can.

For example, the following two methods achieve the same result:

A. Deprecated method for modifying Settings (Environment Variable in .zshrc)

DISABLE_AUTO_UPDATE=true

B. Recommended method for modifying Settings (zstyle Setting)

zstyle ':omz:update' mode disabled

I'm surprised no one mentioned the new and fine-tuned controls over OhMyZsh updates, that deprecates the old method.

This of course does not prevent you from invoking zstyle from .zshrc.

You can try the following commands that are stated by OMZ docs:

OMZ Docs -- Getting Updates

You have several options to tweak OMZ updates.

• By default, you will be prompted to check for updates every 2 weeks. You can choose other update modes by adding a line to your ~/.zshrc file, before Oh My Zsh is loaded:

• Automatic update without confirmation prompt:

zstyle ':omz:update' mode auto

• Just offer a reminder every few days, if there are updates available:

zstyle ':omz:update' mode reminder

• To disable automatic updates entirely:

zstyle ':omz:update' mode disabled

• NOTE: you can control how often Oh My Zsh checks for updates with the following setting:

# This will check for updates every 7 days
zstyle ':omz:update' frequency 7
# This will check for updates every time you open the terminal (not recommended)
zstyle ':omz:update' frequency 0

IMPORTANT (zstyle precondition)

• Do note, the commands above (zstyle) have to be executed strictly from within an OhMyZsh shell.
• In other words, after installing ZSH and OhMyZsh, maybe you decided not to change your default shell to ZSH.
• In that particular case, you have to switch your shell temporarily to ZSH for the above commands to work. You can do that with exec /bin/zsh, this probably applies to .zshrc as well.

Understanding zstyle

• WARNING: This is a potential rabbit hole :)
• Online documentation
• man pages: man zshmodules
• Check out some insightful answers in this question.

Boogiewoogie

How interesting! I wonder if there's any functional or performance difference between using zstyle or environment variables in .zshrc – Lyda

@Lyda that's a good question, I'm not aware of any performance differences. But for functional, using environment variables in .zshrc is deprecated and will be removed in the future. zstyle is encouraged to be used instead. Here's the source for that. Note, that you can invoke and sprinkle zstyle in your .zshrc file. – Boogiewoogie

I will update my answer accordingly, I was not aware the environment variables method was deprecated. Thanks! – Boogiewoogie

One extra functional difference is: Unlike variables they can be different in different contexts and unlike shell options they can take values (source) – Boogiewoogie

The docs leave me with a couple questions - what's the default, zstyle ':omz:update' frequency 7? Does the "reminder" mean the update prompt or just a message the prints when you open a shell? – Marathi

Oh the docs here answer my questions actually: github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Settings#update-settings. Default is "prompt" and reminder is just a reminder – Marathi

Exactly @mowwwalker. reminder is different from the prompt as the former is non-intrusive. I think reminder should be the default. No clue why they thought it was a good idea for the prompt to be the default. – Boogiewoogie

Answer 4

Go to ~/.oh-my-zsh/tools/check-for-upgrade.sh and replace all contents of this file with

true;

Everything else seems to be unreliable.

Standing

Answer 5

I have set an update on background. My crontab:

0 0 * * 0 /bin/zsh -i -c 'omz update' >/dev/null 2>&1

Boni