Add VelaBoard to Your Spigot Plugin Project

Add VelaBoard as a Maven or Gradle dependency, configure your plugin.yml to declare it, and verify the API is ready before use.

VelaBoard is a Spigot plugin that exposes a Java API for managing scoreboards, sidebars, and teams. This page walks you through adding VelaBoard as a compile-time dependency so your plugin can call its API, and configuring your server environment correctly.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have:

• Java 17 or later
• Spigot or Paper 1.20 or later
• Maven or Gradle as your build system

Add the dependency

pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.velahere</groupId>
    <artifactId>velaboard</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.1</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

The scope is provided (Maven) or implementation (Gradle) because VelaBoard runs as a separate plugin on your server — you compile against it, but you do not bundle it into your own JAR.

Declare the plugin dependency

VelaBoard must be installed as a plugin on your server. You also need to declare it in your plugin.yml so Bukkit loads VelaBoard before your plugin starts.

plugin.yml

depend: [VelaBoard]

Without this depend entry, your plugin may load before VelaBoard, causing NoClassDefFoundError or a null handler when you first call the API.

Verify the API is ready

Call ScoreboardAPI.isInitialized() before using any part of the API. If it returns false, VelaBoard has not finished loading — wait for a Bukkit event such as ServerLoadEvent or verify that your plugin.yml dependency is declared correctly.