How to invoke maven default lifecycle

Question

If i call

mvn clean install

maven knows that clean is a lifecycle and install is a phase of the default lifecycle

if i call

mvn deploy

maven will execute all phases of the default lifecycle sequentially.

Is there a way to call the default lifecycle by giving a lifecyle name (instead of executing the last phsae of the lifecycle)?

EDIT: So the question is: is there a command

mvn lifecyclename

that start execution of the default lifecycle?

Answer 1

There is no command to run a lifecycle based on lifecycle name. So you can't do a mvn Default and expect it to run upto Default:deploy. You will have to mention a task of a cycle like test, package, clean and the life-cycle that owns this task will get active.

It does not make sense to have life-cycle as an argument. It will be confusing. For example running mvn clean is the Clean life-cycle or clean task?

Or, it will be more verbose to type mvn clean will run Clean life cycle; and mvn clean:clean will run Clean life cycle until clean task.

---

Maven has three life cycle. Executing a task (say task_N) of any of the life cycle will result in executing the whole life-cycle until that task (task_N). The three life cycles are Clean, Default, and Site.

For more details see here Introduction to Maven Life-cycles and task order

You see when you execute say, mvn test these are the things gets executed in that order

validate > initialize > generate-sources > process-sources > generate-resources > process-resources > compile > process-classes > post-process > generate-test-sources > process-test-sources > generate-test-resources > process-test-resources > test-compile > process-test-classes > test

You can't skip any of the default tasks. You may hook plugins that gets gets executed during a task.