VyroAI

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Installing Your Plugin on a Server

What to do with the .jar after you download it: which folder, why a full restart, and how to tell it actually loaded.

Three steps, and one of them is the one people get wrong

A finished build gives you a single file — yourplugin-1.0.jar — and a Minecraft server has exactly one place it looks for those. Getting it running is genuinely three steps and nothing in between: download it, put it in /plugins, restart the server.

The third one is where it goes wrong, because there is a faster-looking way to do it and it is the wrong way. That has its own box below.

Installing it

  1. Build the project and download the .jar from the build output panel. Older builds are listed under “Build & Export” → History, but only the newest successful build keeps its jar automatically, so keep your own copy of the one you need.
  2. Open your host's file manager — Pterodactyl, Multicraft and the rest all have one — or connect over SFTP if you prefer.
  3. Upload the .jar into the server's /plugins folder. Not a folder inside it, and not the server root.
  4. Stop the server and start it again. Not reload — see below.
  5. Watch the startup log. It should print Enabling YourPlugin.

Step 1 happens here, at the top of the Code Studio. The ▾ beside it opens History, which lists earlier builds, but their jars are not kept for good, so keep your own copy of any you need.

Use a full restart, never /reload

/reload looks like the quick way to pick up a new plugin, and it is the one thing not to do. It tears plugins down and builds them back up underneath a running server, which corrupts plugin state — half-registered listeners, tasks pointing at objects that no longer exist, a plugin that is loaded and does not work.

The damage does not always show up straight away, and when it does, the errors in your console describe a problem you do not have. Stop the server and start it again. On a busy server that is thirty seconds of downtime, and it is always the cheaper option.

How you know it worked

Two checks, both free:

If it is missing from both, it is almost always one of two things: the jar is in the wrong folder, or the server was not actually restarted. Check the folder first. It is much more often the folder.

If your server runs a different Minecraft version

The jar is built for the Minecraft version written in your project's build file — pom.xml or build.gradle — and it expects a server on that version. If the two do not match, the plugin either refuses to enable or breaks the first time somebody uses it.

Change the project, not the server. Tell the AI in a message which version your server runs — for example "make it for Paper 1.21.11" — so it rewrites the build file for that version. Then build again and upload the new jar. Write it as a request, not a question: "will it work on 1.20?" is not taken as a choice. The message is a normal AI run and costs credits like any other.

Changing the Minecraft version in Project Settings → Build and pressing Build is not enough on its own. Cloud Build does not apply that setting: you get the same jar again, and the build log adds a [WARNING] line saying the jar was built for the version in the build files. Downgrading a live server to suit a plugin means worlds, other plugins and player data all have to come with it, so fix the project instead. See Which Servers Your Plugin Runs On for the versions you can pick.

If your build produced two jars

Ticking a proxy platform — Velocity, BungeeCord or Waterfall — gives you a second jar, because a proxy is a separate program with its own plugin system. The two files are not interchangeable: the proxy jar belongs to the proxy's own plugins folder, and the server jar goes on each game server behind it. Which Servers Your Plugin Runs On explains when you get two.

Any host that lets you upload a file into /plugins will run a VyroAI plugin — that really is the whole requirement. If your host gives you no file access at all, that is the thing to fix, and it is worth fixing whatever you build with.

Try it now: Describe your plugin and see the plan, free and with no account. Open the plugin generator

Where to next

15 of 22 in Minecraft Studio · Last checked 12 September 2026 · Previous: When the Build Connection Drops