Hangar PaperMC Plugins Scraper

Export Minecraft plugins from Hangar — the official PaperMC plugin registry for Paper, Velocity, and Waterfall. Get clean structured data for every project: name, owner, description, downloads, recent downloads, stars, watchers, category, supported platforms & versions, license, keywords, tags, links, and members.

Data comes from the public Hangar REST API (https://hangar.papermc.io/api/v1/), the same API that powers the website. No browser, no proxy, no login.

What can it do?

• Registry-wide export. Page through Hangar (~4,000 plugins) sorted by downloads, recent downloads, stars, newest, or recently updated.
• Search. Full-text search exactly like the Hangar search box (viaversion, worldguard, economy …).
• Category filter. Admin tools, chat, economy, gameplay, protection, world management, and more.
• Platform filter. Paper, Velocity, or Waterfall.
• Details (optional). License, keywords, tags, external links (source, issues, donate), member names, and full platform version matrices.
• Fast and cheap. Pure JSON API, 50 projects per request, concurrency capped at 4 with Retry-After backoff. Runs on 256 MB.

Use cases

• Server ops research: discover plugins by downloads, stars, and platform support
• Competitor / ecosystem tracking for plugin authors (release cadence, stars, downloads)
• Lead generation: maintainers and GitHub/source links from Hangar project pages
• Modding market datasets for AI / RAG about the PaperMC plugin ecosystem
• Scheduled snapshots of the Hangar catalog

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Full-text search. Empty = browse by sort order.
sort	string	-downloads (default), -recent_downloads, -stars, -newest, -updated, or ascending variants.
category	string	Optional category (admin_tools, economy, gameplay, …).
platform	string	Optional PAPER, VELOCITY, or WATERFALL.
maxItems	integer	Max plugins to output (default 100).
includeDetails	boolean	Fetch license, keywords, links, members, platforms (default true).

Example: top plugins by downloads with full details:

{ "sort": "-downloads", "maxItems": 100, "includeDetails": true }

Example: Paper economy plugins matching “bank”:

{
  "query": "bank",
  "category": "economy",
  "platform": "PAPER",
  "sort": "-downloads",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

One dataset item per plugin:

{
  "id": 12,
  "name": "ViaBackwards",
  "owner": "ViaVersion",
  "slug": "ViaBackwards",
  "description": "Allow Java Edition clients with older versions to connect to your Minecraft server",
  "category": "misc",
  "visibility": "public",
  "downloads": 755969,
  "recentDownloads": 21853,
  "views": 1257942,
  "recentViews": 40790,
  "stars": 287,
  "watchers": 166,
  "platforms": ["PAPER", "VELOCITY", "WATERFALL"],
  "platformVersions": {
    "PAPER": ["1.21", "1.21.1"],
    "VELOCITY": ["3.4", "3.5"]
  },
  "license": "GPL",
  "licenseUrl": "https://github.com/ViaVersion/ViaBackwards/blob/master/LICENSE",
  "keywords": ["viaversion", "viabackwards", "protocolhack"],
  "tags": ["SUPPORTS_FOLIA", "ADDON"],
  "links": [
    { "name": "Source", "url": "https://github.com/ViaVersion/ViaBackwards/", "group": "top" },
    { "name": "Issues", "url": "https://github.com/ViaVersion/ViaBackwards/issues", "group": "top" }
  ],
  "members": ["kennytv"],
  "avatarUrl": "https://hangarcdn.papermc.io/...",
  "createdAt": "2022-12-23T20:47:00.582094Z",
  "publishedAt": "2022-12-23T20:57:21.569868Z",
  "lastUpdated": "2026-10-12T16:59:59.324096Z",
  "url": "https://hangar.papermc.io/ViaVersion/ViaBackwards",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-14T20:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.002 per plugin ($2 per 1,000 results).

Notes

• Uses Hangar’s public REST API only. Identifies as hangar-papermc-plugins-scraper (Apify; +https://apify.com/confidential_marina).
• Rate limits are respected with concurrency ≤ 4 and Retry-After backoff.