Installing plugins

Adding plugins from the built-in browser, and what to do when one refuses to load.

Last updated: 2026-07-21

Plugins add features to a server without players installing anything. Permissions, economy, land claims, anti-cheat — all of it is plugins.

You need the right engine first

Plugins only work on the Bukkit family: Paper, Purpur, Spigot, CraftBukkit, Pufferfish, Folia. On Vanilla, Forge or Fabric there is nothing to load them.

The Plugins tab tells you if your engine cannot use them, rather than letting you install something that will never run. If that happens, switch engine in Version and engine — Paper is the usual choice.

Installing

Search in the Plugins tab, pick a result, install. The panel fetches the correct build for your Minecraft version and puts it in /plugins for you.

Restart the server afterwards. Most plugins only load at startup, and a plugin sitting in the folder without a restart does nothing.

After the first start

A freshly installed plugin usually creates its own configuration folder inside /plugins on first boot. That is where you change its settings — see Files.

Two habits worth forming:

Start the server once after installing, before configuring. The config file will not exist until the plugin has run at least once.

Add plugins a few at a time. If something breaks with twenty new plugins, you have twenty suspects. With three, you have three.

When a plugin does not load

The console says why, and it is nearly always one of these:

Wrong Minecraft version. A plugin built for 1.20 on a 1.21 server usually refuses to load, sometimes with an obvious error, sometimes with a vague one. Check the plugin's supported versions.

A missing dependency. Many plugins need another one — Vault for economy, PlaceholderAPI for text placeholders, a protocol library for packet work. The console names what is missing.

Wrong engine. A Forge mod dropped into /plugins is silently ignored. Nothing appears in the log at all, which makes this one confusing to diagnose.

Two plugins doing the same job. Two land-claim or two economy plugins will fight. Symptoms are odd rather than fatal: commands work sometimes, data does not save.

After any plugin problem, read the console from the start of the boot, not from the end. Load errors appear early, and by the time the server says it is ready they have scrolled far out of sight.

Removing a plugin

Delete its jar from /plugins and restart. The configuration folder stays behind — harmless, but worth deleting too if you are not coming back to it.

Some plugins keep data in a database or in world files. Removing the jar does not clean that up; if the plugin has an uninstall procedure, follow it before deleting.