Hook into PlaceholderAPI

Spigot page | GitHub Release*

*The GitHub release may be different from the spigot release

This page is about using PlaceholderAPI in your own plugin, to either let other plugins use your plugin, or just use placeholders from other plugins in your own.

Please note, that the examples in this page are only available for PlaceholderAPI 2.0.6 or higher!

First steps

Before you can actually make use of PlaceholderAPI, you first have to import it into your project.

Import with Maven

To import PlaceholderAPI, simply add the following code to your pom.xml
Replace {VERSION} with the version listed at the top of this page.

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>placeholderapi</id>
            <url>http://repo.extendedclip.com/content/repositories/placeholderapi/</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
         <groupId>me.clip</groupId>
          <artifactId>placeholderapi</artifactId>
          <version>{VERSION}</version>
         <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

Import with Gradle

Here is how you can import PlaceholderAPI through gradle.
Put this into your Gradle.build.
Replace {VERSION} with the version listed at the top of this page.

repositories {
    maven {
        url = 'http://repo.extendedclip.com/content/repositories/placeholderapi/'
    }
}

dependencies {
    compileOnly 'me.clip:placeholderapi:{VERSION}'
}

Import manually

Do the following steps, if you can't import PlaceholderAPI through Maven or Gradle.

Eclipse

Rightclick your project and choose "Properties -> Java Build Path".
Click on "Add external jar" and add the PlaceholderAPI.jar (Pluginpage) to your project.

IntelliJ

1. Click on File -> Project Structure (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S on windows)
2. Go to the tab Modules
3. Click the + on the right side and choose Library... -> Java
4. Select the PlaceholderAPI.jar

Set PlaceholderAPI as (soft)depend

Next step is to go to your plugin.yml and add PlaceholderAPI as a depend or softdepend, depending (no pun intended) on if it is optional or not.

Example Softdepend:

name: ExamplePlugin
version: 1.0
author: author
main: your.main.path.here

softdepend: [PlaceholderAPI] # This is used, if your plugin works without PlaceholderAPI.

Example Depend:

name: ExamplePlugin
version: 1.0
author: author
main: your.main.path.here

depend: [PlaceholderAPI] # If your plugin requires PlaceholderAPI, to work, use this.

Adding placeholders to PlaceholderAPI

You can add your placeholders to PlaceholderAPI plugin by making an external expansion or by implementing that into your plugin itself if you're adding placeholders from a plugin.

Without external plugin

Here you can see how to make an external expansion that doesn't require a plugin (Placeholders without a plugin).

With external plugin

You can add your plugin's placeholders to PlaceholderAPI with two ways:

1. By making an external expansion (Separate jar file).
2. By creating a class inside your plugin (Inner class).

Using placeholders from PlaceholderAPI in your plugin

To use placeholders from other plugins in our own plugin, we simply have to use the setPlaceholders method.

Let's assume we want to send an own join message that shows the group a player has.
To achieve that, we can do the following:

package at.helpch.placeholderapi;

import me.clip.placeholderapi.PlaceholderAPI;

import org.bukkit.Bukkit;
import org.bukkit.event.EventHandler;
import org.bukkit.event.EventPriority;
import org.bukkit.event.Listener;
import org.bukkit.event.player.PlayerJoinEvent;
import org.bukkit.plugin.java.JavaPlugin;
import me.clip.placeholderapi.PlaceholderAPI;

public class JoinExample extends JavaPlugin implements Listener {

    @Override
    public void onEnable() {
 
        if (Bukkit.getPluginManager().getPlugin("PlaceholderAPI") != null) {
            /*
             * We register the EventListeneres here, when PlaceholderAPI is installed.
             * Since all events are in the main class (this class), we simply use "this"
             */
            Bukkit.getPluginManager().registerEvents(this, this);
        } else {
            throw new RuntimeException("Could not find PlaceholderAPI!! Plugin can not work without it!");
        }
    }

    @EventHandler(priority = EventPriority.HIGHEST)
    public void onJoin(PlayerJoinEvent event) {
        String joinText = "%player_name% &ajoined the server! He/she is rank &f%vault_rank%";

        // We parse the placeholders using "setPlaceholders"
        joinText = PlaceholderAPI.setPlaceholders(event.getPlayer(), joinText);

        event.setJoinMessage(withPlaceholdersSet);
    }
}