5.2 Pinning packages using :pin

use-package can pin a package to a specific archive using the :pin keyword.⁵ This allows you to mix and match packages from different archives. The primary use-case for this is preferring to install packages from GNU ELPA or NonGNU ELPA (indicated by gnu and nongnu, respectively), while installing specific packages from third-party archives.

For example:

(use-package company
  :ensure t
  :pin gnu)   ; GNU ELPA

Unfortunately, the third-party archive MELPA uses a versioning scheme based on dates, which means that packages from that archive are always preferred. If you are using that archive, we strongly encourage you to customize use-package-always-pin to nongnu. This guarantees that you are using a version of that package that has been specifically marked for release by its developer, and not a development snapshot.

If you want to manually keep a package updated and ignore upstream updates, you can pin it to ‘manual’. This will work as long as you have not customized a repository to use that name in the package-archives variable.

Example:

(use-package org
  :ensure t
  ;; ignore org-mode from upstream and use a manually installed version
  :pin manual)

use-package signals an error if you try to pin a package to an archive that is not configured using package-archives (except from the special ‘manual’ archive).