The Minecraft community seems to have an obsession with doing everything on YouTube. For some people that’s great, but as someone who is already a coder and I just need to know the environment-specific details for coding for Minecraft I have a really hard time sitting through an hour of tutorial videos just to get the four things I needed to know that I didn’t already know how to do. This is where having a text and pictures version of a tutorial comes in handy, so you can skim through it looking for the parts you still need to know, and easily skip over the stuff you already know. Another friend of mine was also recently trying to get into writing a plugin for Spigot, and everything I could find to point him at which was text-based rather than a YouTube video was very outdated, had instructions that were no longer relevant because Bukkit and Spigot and Eclipse have all evolved since then, etc. So I figured I’d write one, and here it is!
Update: since writing this up, I discovered a very nice page on the Spigot Wiki documenting much of this, which seems to be mysteriously absent from the search engine searches I did trying to find this information (or at least ranked low enough that all the YouTube videos and a bunch of forum posts that skirt this issue outrank it). How to create a Minecraft/Bukkit/Spigot plugin on the SpigotMC website. I’m posting this anyway because I do a few things differently. Pick your flavor. 🙂