Maven – The basic build phases

These notes are summarized from the main Maven site, at ‘Introduction to the Build Lifecycle‘.

These notes assume a standard Maven installation.

The basic build phases (think Ant ‘targets’) for Maven builds are the following:

• validate – validate the project is correct and all necessary information is available
• compile – compile the source code of the project
• test – test the compiled source code using a suitable unit testing framework. These tests should not require the code be packaged or deployed
• package – take the compiled code and package it in its distributable format, such as a JAR.
• integration-test – process and deploy the package if necessary into an environment where integration tests can be run
• verify – run any checks to verify the package is valid and meets quality criteria
• install – install the package into the local repository, for use as a dependency in other projects locally
• deploy – done in an integration or release environment, copies the final package to the remote repository for sharing with other developers and projects.

For a complete list of the build phases, refer to the Lifecycle Reference.

To run any phase, specify:

mvn <phase>

For example to compile a project:

mvn compile