PlaceholderAPI — a plugin for substituting dynamic data in Minecraft

PlaceholderAPI — a plugin for substituting dynamic data in Minecraft

• Minecraft version the article was tested and written on: 26.1.2

• Range of supported versions: 1.8.x – 26.1.x

PlaceholderAPI (PAPI for short) is a server-side plugin for Minecraft that substitutes dynamic values into text in place of special markers. On its own it doesn't output anything: it's an engine that finds a marker like %player_name% in a string and replaces it with the actual value — the player's name, balance, rank, server online count. The data itself is supplied by separate modules — expansions, while PAPI only performs the substitution. Thanks to this, chat, scoreboard, tab list, and menu plugins all read values in the same format, without their own syntax.

Placeholder format

A placeholder is written between two percent signs: %<розширення>_<параметр>%. The first part before the underscore is the expansion name, followed by the specific parameter. For example, %player_name% returns the player's name, and %server_online% returns the number of players online.

The substitution only works where the receiving plugin itself calls it. If a plugin doesn't support PAPI, markers in its messages remain plain text. You can check a specific placeholder with the parse command:

/papi parse me %player_name%

If the marker text itself is returned instead of a value, the required expansion is missing or the source plugin is disabled.

Expansions and eCloud

PlaceholderAPI ships with no placeholders out of the box — they all come from expansions. Some are built into the source plugin and register themselves when the server starts; others are separate jar files in the expansion cloud (eCloud) and are installed into the /plugins/PlaceholderAPI/expansions/ directory.

You can download the expansion you need directly from the game:

/papi ecloud download <розширення>

/papi reload

Only verified expansions can be downloaded via the command — this is a safeguard against malicious code. Unverified ones are installed manually: download the jar from the site and place it in the expansions folder.

Commands

All commands start with /papi. By default they are only available to operators; individual permissions are granted through the placeholderapi.* nodes.

Config

In config.yml only a few parameters are useful to edit:

The rest of the values in the file are internal (expansion protection, replacement mode in Adventure components, debug) and are left at their defaults.

Conclusion

PlaceholderAPI provides a single data-substitution format that hundreds of plugins understand: instead of a separate integration for every plugin, one line with a placeholder is enough. It's needed by Minecraft server admins with chat, tab list, scoreboard, or menus built on dynamic data; for singleplayer it has no use.