The solution: First things first you will probably need to register the plugins group, so that Maven will know where to look. To do this you should put an entry in your settings.xml file. For our example here we will use the Jetty plugin. It has a group id of 'org.mortbay.jetty'. In your settings.xml file put an entry such as:
<pluginGroups>
<pluginGroup>org.mortbay.jetty</pluginGroup>
</pluginGroups>
What this little piece of configuration does is tell Maven to search for plugins registered under the given group id. You can have as many 'pluginGroup' elements in your xml file as you want/need. In all my work with Maven I have only actually registered two plugin groups, one of which is Jetty... but if you create your own you will need to register your plugin group.
Lets start by creating a web application using a Maven archetype:
mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-webapp -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp
This will create a folder called 'my-webapp'. Change over to this directory. Now we are going to use the long way of specifying the plugin. This is ugly and you certainly will not want to use this form often (likely ever).
mvn org.mortbay.jetty:maven-jetty-plugin:run
You should now be able to hit your web app on http://localhost:8080. The above command could be broken down as 'mvn groupId:artifactId:goal'. More on this in a bit. Now lets run the same 'run' goal using a short command syntax. Here is a simpler way to do the same thing:
mvn jetty:run
Much easier. Now I'll explain a bit. Since we put the plugin group entry in our settings.xml file we do not need to specify it like we did in the long command above. In the long command, after the group id, we have 'maven-jetty-plugin'. Maven expects the artifact id to be in a form 'maven-
If your are interested in creating your own plugin I suggest you check this link out. It is not nearly as hard as you may imagine.
