Java – How to solve “Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-clean-plugin:2.4.1:clean (default-clean) on project”

In my case of a similar problem, instead of using Andrew's suggestion for the fix, it worked simply after I introduced <pluginManagement> tag to the pom.xml in question. Looks like that error is due to a missing <pluginManagement> tag. So, in order to avoid the exceptions in Eclipse, one needs to simply enclose all the plugin tags inside a <pluginManagement> tag, like so:

<build>
    <pluginManagement>
        <plugins>
            <plugin> ... </plugin>
            <plugin> ... </plugin>
                  ....
        </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
</build>

Once this structure is in place, the error goes away.

as you can see the plugin is looking in D:\WEB-INF path to get the web.xml needed to do war packaging and that's obviously wrong place to look. you need to specify explicitly either by passing -Dmaven.war.webxml=..../WEB-INF/web.xml argument at runtime on the terminal or you could put the configuration in your pom by adding

 <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3</version>
    <executions>
      <execution>
         <phase>package</phase>
         <configuration>
           <webXml>..../WEB-INF/web.xml</webXml>
         </configuration>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>

Please note: you don't need to declare the absolute path, relative path to your project pom should be sufficient. Replace the dots with the correct path.

I am guessing your are not using the default maven war project layout and that is why you are getting this error. if you were, the plugin would have got the web.xml from src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml by default as per the below example.

• pom.xml
• src
  • main
    • java
    • resources
    • webapp
      • WEB-INF
        • web.xml