Chainmail is a wrapper for the Minecraft server software, which enables the addition of custom functionality via plugins.
Chainmail works by running the Minecraft server software as a subprocess, reading all output to standard output from the process and parsing it to understand what is happening on the server, and writing to standard in to interact with the server.
It provides a wide variety of events that plugin authors can act on, as well as a suite of tools to greatly simplify the process of interacting with the server, such as:
Plugin support for Chainmail is provided by Jigsaw, which was initially a part of Chainmail but was later split into it’s own library.