Troubleshooting and FAQ - PEXPlugins/PermissionsEx GitHub Wiki

PermissionsEX allows for a great deal of control over your server, especially with ModifyWorld. However, this flexibility makes PEX one of the more complicated plugins to configure.

What follows is an attempt to provide troubleshooting tips and a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

• Be sure your permissions.yml file follows the correct formatting.
• Asking for Help
  • Ask in the correct area: our IRC channel or in the PEX forums
  • Provide sufficient information
• Have You Tried it with just bukkit and PEX?
• Debug Mode
• Frequently Asked Questions/Seen Errors
  • Frequently Seen Problems
    • "Players can't do anything, it just says you are not permitted to interact with xxxx block"
    • "PEX stops working/breaks plugins after using /reload"
    • "PEX makes my server say Internal Server Error"
    • PEX Denies Access to a Node that is in the Correct Group
    • Plugin $FOO is giving me permission $BAR when I didn't tell it to!
  • Frequently Seen Errors
    • ERROR: while scanning for the next token found character '\t'...
    • Permissions manager is not accessable. Is the PermissionsEx plugin enabled?
    • Unexpected exception while parsing console command...

The people in IRC and the forums are willing to help figure out any problems that you might run into. However, to be able to do it, you will need to help them out as well. Posting "it doesn't work" or just the error from the server console doesn't help anyone. It is strongly suggested that you do the following:

• Do not post a new ticket unless you are 100% certain the issue lies with PermissionsEX rather than user error.
• For help configuring PermissionsEX please use the forums.
• Feature requests should be posted as tickets. However, you should check to make sure the feature has not already been requested.
• All YAML errors should be posted in the technical help forums. YAML access is provided to PermissionsEx through Bukkit, so PermissionsEx is not at fault if you receive a YAML error.

• Be specific in what the problem is. Good info = 'This error appeared when I tried to run the command pex 'reload'. Bad info = This error appeared when I try to run any command.
• Link or post to your permissions.yml and config.yml using one of the free services such as pastebin (http://pastebin.com/) or equivalent.
• As with your permissions and config files, link or post your server startup log, starting with the bukkit version line ([INFO] This server is running Craftbukkit version git-Bukkit-1.0.1-R1-b1597jnks (MC: 1.0.1) (Implementing API version 1.0.1-R1))
• If you don't or can't use pastebin (or equivalent), please oh please, use code tags so the formatting of the text is preserved! Most forum software will remove extra spaces in posts, and the YAML format is very sensitive to spacing!

At a base level. there is nothing special about a minecraft server host. You can quite easily set up a test server on virtually any machine you have. Testing with just PEX installed can help quickly narrow down a problem by eliminating the potential of other conflicting plugins that might be blocking PEX or just general incompatibilities (and they do exist).

Start with the page http://wiki.bukkit.org/Setting_up_a_server, or check with your favorite search engine for further instructions.

One of the best ways to troubleshoot a permissions problem with PEX is to turn on debug mode. In your PEX config.yml, set the following two options:

• Under the superperms section, set debug: to true
• Under the main permissions section, set debug: to true

When these two options are set, PEX will display all permission node checks as they occur, making it much easier to figure out why a user or group is told they don't have permissions.

When you are done, it is recommended to set the main debug line back to false, but leave the one for superperms turned on. Don't worry about PEX spamming your console or log, the debug output will not appear with this setting until you run pex toggle debug to turn on global debug. If you want to debug just a specific player, the pex user <user> toggle debug command can be used for that.

See Commands, Utility Commands Section for more on the debug command.

See Plugin-Configuration for more on the PEX config.yml file

This is not a PEX or Modifyworld message or problem. This message is from Essentials AntiBuild. Check the documentation for Essentials on how to adjust this.

Yes, this is a known thing. /reload breaks a lot of plugins, not just PEX. Don't use it. /reload (not /pex reload) can do a lot of bad things to your server.

See the Petition to Remove the Reload Command thread on the bukkit forums for technical details. ##### "PEX makes my server say Internal Server Error" (top) This is a generic message that appears on the client side to let the player know that an error occured. You need to look in your server log file to find the actual error message. Posting this alone doesn't tell anything.

This glitch is now fixed in PermissionsEx 1.19+ (Thanks to Sporadisk http://forums.bukkit.org/members/sporadisk.83171/ for pointing this one out)

• When checking for a permission node, PEX converts the permission request string to lowercase, resulting in this problem:

User Sporadisk checked for "multiverse.access.Kelewan", no permission found

Sporadisk's permissions:
   multiverse.access.Kelewan

This means that permission configs with uppercase characters that worked in other plugins, or in PEX versions prior to 1.16, are now unable to be matched. The fix/workaround is to make all the nodes in your permissions settings lowercase.

Did you miss the Important Information on the * Node section on the Basic Permissions Setup page? In case you did, here it is again:

• PEX does support a 'give all permissions' node with '*'. However, before using this, read and understand how it works and it's possible side affects. (This subject generates a lot of traffic on the forums. Due to this, it's not recommended to use '*'.)
  • At first glance, it seems simple, giving a group '*' gives it access to all permission nodes. The catch is that there may be permission nodes that you normally would not want a group to have. To illustrate, consider the plugin VanishNoPacket (Referred to as VNP. Note that we are not picking on this plugin, it just happens to be one of the more commonly mentioned plugins in the forums). VNP offers the node vanish.silentjoin which makes anyone with the node log into the server invisible and without any announcement, which often is not what is wanted. This behavior can be dealt with by negating the nodes in question, but it still catches a lot of people off guard.

However if you aren't using the '*' permission anywhere, please ask on the forum.

• This isn't a PEX error, this is a generic YAML error. PEX uses the YAML file format for it's config file. YAML is case sensitive ('A' is not the same as 'a') and tabs are not allowed. This error, with the '\t', is saying that you have a tab in your config file. PEX will unload itself with an error such as this. Check your config files for tabs (http://yaml-online-parser.appspot.com/ is a great help for doing this). See the PEX File Format (YAML) section for more.

• This is a somewhat generic error that has appear when PEX either unloads itself due to a file configuration problem or another permissions manager has loaded before PEX and has "blocked" PEX from dealing with permissions. Check your server logs for errors regarding PEX or other permissions managers loading before PEX.

• This error can appear when running a PEX command and your permissions file is missing a section, such as trying to set a ranking ladder group when you don't have any groups defined. Make sure you have at least one group defined before doing anything else.

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