You should create the group with in game commands, that way you will have the json data created correctly. Determine your groups, and their permissions, and then run the commands to create the group with at least 1 permission. I do not know your idea or your server environment, so I’ll try to guess.
You need 6 groups? What are the names? What are the permission nodes? What plugins are you giving permissions for? What is your lowest level group? What is your highest level group?
Group1 = all users that join, all basic permissions.
Group2 = users you promote, all basic permissions (inherited from Group1), some other specific permissions.
Group3 = users you promote, all permissions inherited from Group2 (includes Group1), some other specific permissions.
Group4 = users you promote, all permissions inherited from Group1, some other specific permissions.
Group5 = Moderator level, inherited permissions from Group2, extra moderator permissions.
Group6 = Admin or OP level.
First you need to make yourself an Admin/OP and an Admin/OP group and add yourself to it, and you also need to give the console admin/OP permissions. PEX will take over your permissions, if you do not add permissions for the console, you will lock the server out of all commands.
Here are the commands to get you started (MoeBoy76 created a very nice guide, I don’t want to retype all that glorious detail!)
/pex user Gold_Games perm default-permissions 1
/pex user console perm default-permissions 1
/pex group Group6 perm default-permissions 1
/pex user Gold_Games parent add group Group6
The above commands set the console to have OP rights, set Group6 with OP rights, set your username (Gold_Games) as and OP, and then added your username (Gold_Games) to the Admin/OP group.
As I said before, I do not know what plugins you have and what permission nodes you need, each plugin has a set of permission nodes. PEX, for example, has a permission node for reloading PEX, that permission node is permissionsex.reload. Lets say you want to give the moderator group permissions to that, the moderator group is Group5, the command to add that permission node to that group is this…
/pex group Group5 perm permissionsex.reload 1
Once you create some groups and some permissions, you can see how the json file is constructed and edit it manually, each save will require a reload of pex (/pex reload) to apply those permissions.
If you want to add some kind of rank ladder, you’ll need to create a ladder and add groups to it in an order that pertains to the groups. In the above group breakdown, Group1, Group2, and Group3 inherit permissions from each other and would be considered groups that you can promote/demote users into and out of. Here are some commands to create this basic ladder.
/pex rank default add 0 Group1
/pex rank default add 1 Group2
/pex rank default add 2 Group3
This will create a ladder called “default” and add those three groups in the promotion order of 0 to 2. With the position of 0, all users in Group1, which is any user that joins the server, can be promoted to Group2 with a simple command like this.
/pex promote [username]
This will move [username] out of Group1 and place them into Group2 where the permissions will be inherited from that group.
I’m not sure there is much else we can give you as far as help goes. MoeBoy76 has created a very good guide for getting started.