The deploy plugin is primarily used during the deploy phase, to add your artifact(s) to a remote repository for sharing with other developers and projects. This is usually done in an integration or release environment. It can also be used to deploy a particular artifact (e.g. a third party jar like Sun's non redistributable reference implementations).
As a repository contains more than the artifacts (POMs, the metadata, MD5 and SHA1 hash files...), deploying means not only copying the artifacts, but making sure all this information is correctly updated. It's the reponsibility of the deploy plugin.
To work, the deployment will require:
The information will be taken from the implied (or specified) pom and from the command line. The settings.xml file may also be parsed to retrieve user credentials.
The deploy plugin has 2 goals:
General instructions on how to use the Deploy Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below. Last but not least, users occasionally contribute additional examples, tips or errata to the plugin's wiki page.
In case you still have questions regarding the plugin's usage, please have a look at the FAQ and feel free to contact the user mailing list. The posts to the mailing list are archived and could already contain the answer to your question as part of an older thread. Hence, it is also worth browsing/searching the mail archive.
If you feel like the plugin is missing a feature or has a defect, you can fill a feature request or bug report in our issue tracker. When creating a new issue, please provide a comprehensive description of your concern. Especially for fixing bugs it is crucial that the developers can reproduce your problem. For this reason, entire debug logs, POMs or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven.