Installing Plugins

Plugins need installing into the local Maven repository before use.

Manual Download and Manual Install

After you have downloaded a plugin for Maven (from Maven-Plugins, or from a different source), you should look in your Maven installation and you will find $MAVEN_HOME/plugins/. You need to copy your plugin into that directory. If you then type maven -g you will get a list of all plugins and goals that Maven can find (note that you may need to remove your ".maven/cache" directory first, because Maven caches plugin information).

Manual Download and Automatic Install

Make Your Project Aware of the SourceForge Repository

You can set up your Maven installation to "know about" the Maven-Plugins project. To do this you need to add http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/repository to your maven.repo.remote property (can be set in project.properties for example).

Typically it will look like maven.repo.remote=http://www.ibiblio.org/maven,http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/repository

Manual Download

You can then download and install plugins as follows 

maven -DartifactId=ARTIFACTID -DgroupId=GROUPID -Dversion=VERSION plugin:download
replacing ARTIFACTID, GROUPID, VERSION by the details from the plugin that you want to download. This will then download the plugin and install it in your local set-up. For example to download the findbugs plugin, use: 

maven -DartifactId=maven-findbugs-plugin -DgroupId=maven-plugins -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT plugin:download -Dmaven.repo.remote=http://www.ibiblio.org/maven,http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/repository

Automatic Download and Automatic Install

Automatic Download

Make your project aware of the SourceForge repository by following the instructions above.

Instead of manually downloading, you can add a dependency in the project.xml file so that anyone building your product will have the plugin automatically downloaded and installed. 

<dependency>
  <groupId>maven-plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-(PLUGIN_NAME)-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>(PLUGIN_VERSION)</version>
  <type>plugin</type>
</dependency>

Using Snapshots

If you need to use/test a snapshot version instead of a released version, use the following snapshot repository in the above instructions: http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/snapshot-repository