The install goal of the Install plugin is almost always bound to the install lifecycle phase. This install:install goal simply installs a project's main artifact to the local repository. If you have a project with a groupId of org.sonatype.mavenbook, an artifactId of simple-test, and a version of 1.0.2, the install:install goal is going to copy the JAR file from target/simple-test-1.0.2.jar to ~/.m2/repository/org/sonatype/mavenbook/simple-test/1.0.2/simple-test-1.0.2.jar. If the project has POM packaging, this goal will copy the POM to the local repository.