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

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.

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.

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.