Maven Deploy Plugin Conflict with Nexus | Generated by AI

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Question: What happens if Maven has both a custom deploy plugin and the default deploy plugin enabled, causing deployment to Nexus to run twice and return HTTP 400 errors?

Answer:

Yes — this is a common Maven deployment issue. If both your custom deploy plugin and the default Maven deploy plugin run during the deploy phase, Maven will try to upload the same artifact twice to Nexus.

This usually results in:

Most Nexus repositories do not allow redeploy for release versions, so the second upload is rejected.

Why this happens

Maven lifecycle already binds this plugin automatically:

deploy phase
 └── maven-deploy-plugin (default)

If you also added something like:

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.company</groupId>
  <artifactId>custom-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>deploy</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>deploy</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Then both will run:

deploy phase
 ├── custom deploy plugin
 └── maven-deploy-plugin (default)

So Nexus receives:

PUT artifact.jar  (OK)
PUT artifact.jar  (400 Bad Request)

How to fix (3 correct solutions)

Solution 1 — Disable default deploy plugin (most common)

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-deploy-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>3.1.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <skip>true</skip>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

This keeps only your custom deploy.

Solution 2 — Change custom plugin phase

Run custom plugin before deploy, e.g.:

<phase>package</phase>

So order becomes:

package → custom plugin
deploy  → default deploy plugin

No duplicate uploads.

Solution 3 — Disable deploy entirely (CI controlled)

If CI handles deployment:

mvn deploy -DskipDeploy

or

<properties>
  <maven.deploy.skip>true</maven.deploy.skip>
</properties>

How to confirm this is your issue

Run:

mvn -X deploy

Look for two deploy executions:

--- custom-deploy-plugin:deploy ---
Uploading to nexus...

--- maven-deploy-plugin:deploy ---
Uploading to nexus...

If you see two uploads → that’s the problem.

Typical Nexus error you will see

400 Bad Request
Repository does not allow updating assets
Artifact already exists

or

Return code is: 400, ReasonPhrase: Bad Request.

Best Practice

If you have custom deploy logic, always:

Never let both run in deploy.

This is a very common enterprise Maven + Nexus pitfall, especially when:

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