Minecraft plugin PlaceholderAPI

🔌 About PlaceholderAPI

PlaceholderAPI is a Minecraft plugin that exposes a centralized placeholder system and an expansion ecosystem (the eCloud). It lets other plugins read and substitute thousands of dynamic placeholders (player data, economy values, plugin-specific values, etc.) without requiring direct integration or hard dependencies.

🎯 Purpose

The plugin solves integration friction between plugins by providing a single, extensible placeholder API. Plugin authors publish "expansions" that supply named placeholders; server administrators install expansions so server-facing plugins (scoreboards, chat, holograms, GUIs) can display live data using a consistent syntax.

⚙️ Features

• Core placeholder parsing API for other plugins to hook into.
• Expansion system: individually packaged expansions or expansions bundled inside plugins.
• eCloud (expansion cloud) for finding and downloading verified expansions in-game.
• Runtime management commands for listing, registering, unregistering and reloading expansions.
• Debug/parse commands to evaluate placeholders for a player or broadcast results, useful for troubleshooting.
• Utilities such as a dump command to share installed expansions and plugin state when seeking support.

🧩 Who It Is For

• Server administrators who need unified dynamic text across multiple plugins (scoreboards, tablists, holograms, GUIs).
• Plugin developers who want to expose or consume placeholders without forcing hard dependencies.
• Survival, minigame, and network servers that combine many plugins and need consistent placeholder syntax.

🏗️ Example Use Cases

• A server installs a Vault expansion so economy placeholders like player balance can be used in scoreboard and chat plugins.
• An admin downloads a plugin-specific expansion from the eCloud so a hologram plugin can show live objective data.
• A developer exposes plugin data via a PlaceholderExpansion so other servers can display that data without depending on the plugin directly.

⌨️ Commands

(Note: the commands above are documented in the official PlaceholderAPI command reference. Permission nodes for individual commands are not listed in the referenced command documentation.)

⚙️ Installation

📥 Setup

• Download the official PlaceholderAPI jar and place it into your server plugins/ directory.
• Start or restart the server and confirm PlaceholderAPI loads in the console.
• Install expansions either by dropping expansion jars into plugins/PlaceholderAPI/expansions/ or by using the in-game eCloud commands (for verified expansions).

📦 Dependencies

• PlaceholderAPI itself does not require a general plugin dependency to function. Some placeholders provided by expansions rely on other plugins (for example, an expansion that reports economy values will require the corresponding economy plugin). Those requirements depend on the specific expansion.

🧠 Technical Notes

• PlaceholderAPI is provided for Spigot-based servers and is commonly used on Paper as well. It exposes an API for plugin developers to register PlaceholderExpansions.
• Expansions can be distributed as standalone jar files or bundled inside other plugins; standalone expansions are commonly installed into plugins/PlaceholderAPI/expansions/.
• The eCloud feature allows in-game discovery and download of verified expansions; servers must allow outbound HTTPS for eCloud downloads to work.
• The plugin includes debug and parsing commands to help administrators verify that placeholders resolve correctly.

🤝 When This Plugin Is Useful

If your server uses multiple plugins that need to display dynamic, cross-plugin data (chat, tab, holograms, scoreboards or GUIs), PlaceholderAPI is useful because it centralizes placeholder resolution and lets you add support for additional plugins via modular expansions without modifying each consumer plugin.