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Setting up GroupManager on your Bukkit server

Even after downloading plugins in your server's "plugins" folder, you will notice that

most of these plugins will only partially (if at all) work. This is because they require permissions so that you can use them fully. But what are permissions? Well, they are simply settings that entitle certain players to do certain things. Currently, with absolutely no permissions defined, the only commands you can use are those that are accessible to ALL users (very few).

Note: If you don't like typing, the you can download a premade plugins folder and follow along

Plugins.zip

What is GroupManager, and where to get it...

In order to enable permissions on our server, we need to download and install a plugin. There are a few plugins that can do this, but our favorite is GroupManager, which you can obtain in a zip file at http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/inactive-admn-info-groupmanager-v1-0-alpha-3-a-permissions-replacement-440-531.4723/ (scroll down and there will be a download link). The zip file contains two *.jar files, which you must copy to your plugins folder. You will also need the Essentials plugin, if you wish to follow along with the article. 

Before having permissions

For those who have read the How to Install Plugins on a Minecraft Server articles, you'll remember that we've installed the Essentials plugin. You'll also remember that we had very few commands available:

Available Commands

Setting it up

Ok, so now to actually set up GroupManager. At this point, you should already have both *.jar files copied into you plugins folder. Now, follow these steps:

  • Start your server, and once it's finished loading, close it by typing stop in the command prompt. Now, you should have GroupManger folder in your plugins folder.

Group Manager Folder

  • Go in the worlds folder, then into the folder corresponding to your world (chances are there's just one) and open the groups.yml file with wordpad, or an equivalent text editor. The file contains premade definitions of some common permission groups, but for the sake of this tutorial, erase them all. You should now be left with an empty groups.yml file. 
  • Now lets say we want our server to have two type of user, the default player and admins. We need to create these two groups in our group file. Here's what this looks like:

Group.yml

  • Notice the Default: true line in the Default group. This tell GroupManager that any user that has not been given a specific title will have whatever permissions are in Default. Currently, there are none, so default players can't use plugins. The inheritance: [] line specifies that a certain group has all the permissions of another group. Per example, if we were to create a SemiAdmin group, we would want them to inherit all the permissions of the Default group, plus some other permissions that we would specify. Finally, the info: lines simply give information as to how the user is displayed in the chat. 
  • Another thing to point out is that the Admin permissions have a '*'. This simply indicates that an admin can access ALL the commands.
  • Now, we need to set up the permissions for our default users. To do this, we must type, under permissions, the name of the plugin [dot] the name of the command. A list of available commands for Essentials can be found here. So lets say we want our default users to be able to view the help screen, and to teleport to the spawn point. We would need to add those commands, giving us:

group.yml modified

And if you connect to the server, and type /help, you should see only the two commands that we've just added:

Custom Commands

Ok, that's great, but this is YOUR server, and you want to be an admin. Simple. Next to the config.yml file is a users.yml file. Open it in wordpad, and delete any text that's in it. Instead, type this (replace Icosebyte by your username):

users.yml

That's it! Now, you're an admin, and you can do whatever you want (responsibly of course). So if you start the server and type /help, you should see a whole bunch of cool commands.

Admin Commands

A final word

So now that you have very basic permissions set up, you can experiment with the numerous options GroupManager provides. If you wish to add more plugins, these should provide a list of all available permissions so that you can set them up. Anyway, thanks for reading, and good luck with your server!

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