When starting a server, you quickly realise that playing vanilla may not provide as much enjoyment as the addition of plugins does. This is where a permissions plugin such as PermissionsEx comes in. PermissionsEx allows you to specify what commands certain players are allowed to type. This means you can create groups such as Owner, Admin, Player and so on and e.g. only allow admins to use /ban.

There are many permissions plugins out there however we feel that PermissionsEx is the easiest to use and the most stable out of them all. 

To begin with, you will need to install PermissionsEx, this can be done by going to Files -> Plugin List on Multicraft and then searching for PermissionsEx. Alternately you can download a specific PermissionsEx version here and upload it via FTP.

After installing the jar, restart your server.

Let's go through a few definitions:

Permission Node - This is the string of text that tells PermissionsEx which commands you are allowed to type. An example is 'essentials.fly', you can find the permission nodes for essentials here. You can find the permission nodes for plugins generally by looking at their Bukkit plugin pages, do not guess permission nodes.

Group - This is where you can have a group of allowed commands and then assign a player to this group which allows them to do all the commands specified using permission nodes. This means you do not need to give each player a permission node to do a command. 

PermissionsEx has a range of commands that make it very easy to manage compared to editing the permissions.yml file found in its plugin folder directly.

The basic commands are as follows:
 
Type the following in the console to allow you to type /pex commands in game: pex user [your username] add permissions.*

After doing the above, you can type the following on the server directly:

/pex group [groupname] create - This command allows you to create a group

/pex group [groupname] add [permission] - This command allows you to add a permission to a group

/pex group [groupname] remove [permission] - This command allows you to remove a permission from a group

/pex group [groupname] prefix [prefix] - This command allows you to set a prefix for a group however please note you need Essentials Chat installed which is part of Essentials

/pex group [groupname] suffix [suffix] - This command allows you to set a suffix for a group however please note you need Essentials Chat installed which is part of Essentials

/pex set default group [groupname] true - This command sets the default group that players will be put into when they join the server for the first time

/pex user [username] group add [groupname] - This command allows you to add a group to a player

/pex user [username] group remove [groupname] - This command allows you to remove a group from a player

/pex user [username] group set [groupname] - This command overrides all of the player's groups with the group entered

/pex user [username] group list - This command shows the groups a player is a member of

Inheritance

Inheritance allows a group to also have the commands of another without you needing to add the same permissions to this group, avoiding duplication.

/pex group [groupname] parents set [groupname to inherit permissions from] - This command sets the group another group should inherit permissions from e.g. /pex group vip parents set default - this command would allow the 'vip' group to use all the commands (permissions) that the 'default' group has access to

/pex group [groupname] parents list - This command lists the groups that a group inherits


The above commands should give you a good start to setting up permissions for your server. You can see the full list of PermissionsEx commands here. If you have any issues after trying the above tutorial then don't hesitate to let us know via Livechat or tickets.