Pinned plugins CAUTION Pinned plugins feature was removed in Jenkins 2.0. Versions later than Jenkins 2.0 do not bundle plugins, instead providing a wizard to install the most useful plugins. The notion of  pinned plugins  applies to plugins that are bundled with Jenkins 1.x, such as the plugin:matrix-auth[ Matrix Authorization plugin ]. By default, whenever Jenkins is upgraded, its bundled plugins overwrite the versions of the plugins that are currently installed in  JENKINS_HOME . However, when a bundled plugin has been manually updated, Jenkins will mark that plugin as pinned to the particular version. On the file system, Jenkins creates an empty file called JENKINS_HOME/plugins/PLUGIN_NAME.hpi.pinned  to indicate the pinning. Pinned plugins will never be overwritten by bundled plugins during Jenkins startup. (Newer versions of Jenkins do warn you if a pinned plugin is  older  than what is currently bundled.) It is safe to update a bundled plugin to a version offered by the Update Center. This is often necessary to pick up the newest features and fixes. The bundled version is occasionally updated, but not consistently. The Plugin Manager allows plugins to be explicitly unpinned. The JENKINS_HOME/plugins/PLUGIN_NAME.hpi.pinned  file can also be manually created/deleted to control the pinning behavior. If the  pinned  file is present, Jenkins will use whatever plugin version the user has specified. If the file is absent, Jenkins will restore the plugin to the default version on startup. 166