You’ve installed Eclipse.

Eclipse includes maven (m2e).

Can you use that Maven from outside Eclipse, or do you need to install maven again/separately?

It turns out you can use it.  Whether its worth the effort or not is another question…

You launch maven using the plexus classworlds launcher.

That needs a config file.

The config file (call it m2.conf) contains something like:

main is org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli from plexus.core

set maven.home default /home/jason/.m2

[plexus.core]
load /home/jason/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.maven.runtime_1.5.1.20150109-1819/jars/*.jar

With that, from a project dir, the following is the equivalent of ‘mvn install’:

java -cp ../eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.maven.runtime_1.5.1.20150109-1819/jars/plexus-classworlds-2.5.1.jar:../eclipse/plugins/org.slf4j.api_1.7.2.v20121108-1250.jar  “-Dclassworlds.conf=m2.conf” org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher install

You could make a shell script to do that.  And you could base the shell script on the one included in the maven distribution.  Or more sensibly, you’d just download  install and use  maven proper.

If you need it.  Right clicking on your project in Eclipse then Run As gives you a handy UI for maven-related stuff:

Finally, note it is  possible to avoid the plexus classworlds launcher by invoking MavenCli directly:

java -cp “../eclipse/plugins/org.slf4j.api_1.7.2.v20121108-1250.jar:../eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.m2e.maven.runtime_1.5.1.20150109-1819/jars/*” org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli install

If you are going to use that, you might wonder about setting maven.home with -Dmaven.home=/your/path/to/where immediately after the classpath