Plugin discovery and execution

To associate a plugin with your Maven project, you have to either define it explicitly in your application POM file, or you should inherit it from a parent POM or the super POM file. Let's take a look at the Maven jar plugin. The jar plugin is defined by the super POM file, and all the Maven projects inherit it. To define a plugin (which is not inherited from the POM hierarchy), or associate a plugin with your Maven project, you must add the plugin configuration under the build/plugins/plugin element of your application pom.xml. In this way, you can associate any number of plugins with your project, as shown here:

<project>   
...   
   <build>     
    <plugins>       
      <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.4</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>default-jar</id>
            <phase>package</phase...