What are Maven goals and phases and what is their difference?

Question

What is the difference/relation between Maven goals and phases? How they are related to each other?

Answer 1

The chosen answer is great, but still I would like to add something small to the topic. An illustration.

It clearly demonstrates how the different phases binded to different plugins and the goals that those plugins expose.

So, let's examine a case of running something like mvn compile:

• It's a phase which execute the compiler plugin with compile goal
• Compiler plugin got different goals. For mvn compile it's mapped to a specific goal, the compile goal.
• It's the same as running mvn compiler:compile

Therefore, phase is made up of plugin goals.

Link to the reference