pin specific application versions with winget to prevent unwanted upgrades in automated provisioning scripts
domain: learn.microsoft.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Pin an app to its currently installed version with `winget pin add --id <PackageId>` so it's excluded from `winget upgrade --all`.
Block all upgrades entirely (including manually targeted ones) with `winget pin add --id <PackageId> --blocking`.
Pin to a version range using a wildcard as the last version component, e.g. `winget pin add --id <PackageId> --version 1.2.*`, to gate upgrades to a minor-version range.
List currently pinned packages with `winget pin list`, and remove a pin with `winget pin remove --id <PackageId>` when upgrades should resume.
Override a blocking pin for a one-off manual upgrade with `winget upgrade --id <PackageId> --force`.
Known gotchas
A pinned package can still be upgraded by something other than winget (e.g., the vendor's own auto-updater), so pinning doesn't guarantee immutability, only that winget itself won't touch it.
`--include-pinned` must be added to `winget upgrade --all` to include pinned packages in a bulk upgrade pass; forgetting it means pinned apps are silently skipped.
A gating version pin's wildcard only works correctly as the last version segment (e.g. `1.2.*`); embedding it elsewhere in the version string does not behave as a range.
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