Intellij IDEA - How to disable automatic plugin update

Whenever you hit 'the check for update' button, IntelliJ checks for IDE update and starts by checking and updating all your active plugins.

The point is that I use a pretty crooked plugin which only works for me in an old version (a release from last year). To be more specific, I'm talking about 'QA Plug PMD' which is not compatible with my imported sonar rules in its last version. Actually, QA Plug PMD's last version is based on PMD 5.0.x and I need QA Plug PMD's 2012 version which is based on PMD 4.3.

In summary, when the QA Plug PMD plugin gets updated, my coding rules are all reseted because the plugin is not backwards-compatible.

That being said, I need to know if there's a way I can tell IntelliJ not to care about this specific plugin during its update process and leave it alone :)

Solution

The best way would probably be to not install it from the plugin repository. Try to install it from disk instead. Download it from the link you provided instead (the zip file will be downloaded):

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Then choose to Install plugin from disk... instead:

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And then point to the pmd.zip file:

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Edit

During the update you will get a question whether you want to update the plugins as well and you can always uncheck that plugin:

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Edit2

Make sure that you don't have the Check for updates in channel checked. That might help you out:

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