I've installed some third party jars to my repository using the following command: mvn install:install-file -Dfile=/home/anotherCoder/Downloads/nifty-1.0.jar -DgroupId=nifty-gui -DartifactId=nifty-gui -Dversion=1.0 -Dpackaging=jar However, once I do mvn compile, maven complains that there is no pom file in the repository and attempts to download it, but can't cause it is not published at any remote repository. Here is the exact message from maven: Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/nifty-gui/nifty-gui/1.0/nifty-gui-1.0.pom [INFO] Unable to find resource 'nifty-gui:nifty-gui:pom:1.0' in repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2) So how do I get maven to generate a pom file for that jar and put it in my local repository?