What is the Maven lifecycle?

The Maven lifecycle is a set of phases that a project goes through during the build process. Each phase is responsible for a specific stage of the process.

Standard lifecycles:

• default: The main lifecycle of the project.
• clean: Cleaning the project.
• site: Generating the project's site documentation.

Phases of the default lifecycle (most commonly used):

• validate: Checks the project for correctness and completeness.
• compile: Compiles the project's source code.
• test: Runs unit tests.
• package: Creates an archive (JAR, WAR, EAR, etc.) of the compiled code and resources.
• verify: Runs integration tests and checks the quality of the build.
• install: Installs the package into the local Maven repository.
• deploy: Deploys the package to a remote repository for sharing.

Executing a phase also automatically executes all previous phases in the same lifecycle.

For example:

# Executes the validate, compile, test, and package phases
mvn package