Hangar: Is it the death of SpigotMC?

Today at 7:07 PM
Friday, 9 June 2023 at 19:07
by Nucker

In April of 2023, PaperMC announced the open beta of their new, open source marketplace platform, Hangar. Hangar started out as a fork of Ore, the custom marketplace for Sponge. Though it has developed massively over the past 2 years since its inception in 2020. It has undergone multiple recodes of its frontend and backend and looks almost unrecognizable from ore.

Today, 2 months after Hangar’s open beta release, it hosts over 450 projects including ViaVersion, Geyser, EssentialsX and more. It allows for plugins for all 3 of PaperMC’s platforms; Paper, Waterfall and Velocity, as well as showing users if it work’s on PaperMC’s fork Folia. Some of it’s other nice, modern features include:

  • Wikis inside of the project
  • Multiple owners of a project
  • Organisations
  • Multiple channels of release
  • Allowing for showing licenses on a project’s page
  • Markdown as opposed to BBCode (which is used by SpigotMC and BuiltByBit)
  • An extensive rest API, and a basic gradle plugin for publishing to Hangar directly.

One of the other big things they have improved on are the conventions for naming. With SpigotMC and BuiltByBit, all the titles of resources contain [BIG CAPITALS INSIDE SQUARE BRACKETS TRYING TO MAKE IT STAND OUT]. SpigotMC in particular was also riddled with update spamming. Because the default order of resources was by most recent update, putting out an update increased downloads significantly and made it hard to find actually high quality plugins. Instead, Hangar encourages Latin alphabet only, no spaces in hope that people literally just put the name of the plugin in the titles.

One very nice feature is it’s plugin importer, that allows you to import any project from SpigotMC directly into Hangar very easily. This has created a very low barrier to entry for developers moving their plugins over.

So what’s in store for the future of Hangar? Well there are no dates for the end of open beta for hangar. In fact it’s warned that it “might stay in this phase for a while”. However, it sounds that the team will be fixing bugs, introducing new features and listening to feedback. One heavily requested feature is the ability to publish premium plugins. Of course, it’s also entirely open source, so we may see different flavours of Hangar pop up for other platforms.

The future of this space is very exciting. We are finally seeing a shift away from the archaic platforms like Curseforge and SpigotMC, with the rise of Modrinth, and now Hangar. We will watch this area with great interest.