Running Apache Maven

The syntax for running Maven is as follows:

    mvn [options] [<goal(s)>] [<phase(s)>]

All available options are documented in the built-in help that you can access with

    mvn -h

The typical invocation for building a Maven project uses a Maven lifecycle phase. E.g.

    mvn verify

The built-in lifecycles and their most used phases, in order, are:

• clean - clean

• default - validate, compile, test, package, verify, install, deploy

• site - site, site-deploy

A fresh build of a project generating all packaged outputs and the documentation site and deploying it to a repository manager could be done with

    mvn clean deploy site-deploy

Just creating the package and installing it in the local repository for re-use from other projects can be done with

    mvn install

And if you don't expect to re-use from other projects, use

    mvn verify

This is the most common build invocation for a Maven project.

When not working with a project, and in some other use cases, you might want to invoke a specific task implemented by a part of Maven - this is called a goal of a plugin. E.g.:

    mvn archetype:generate

or

    mvn checkstyle:check

There are many different plugins available and they all implement different goals.

Further resources:

• Building a Project with Maven