Deployment of artifacts with FTP

FTP is a cleartext protocol: credentials and artifacts cross the network unencrypted, and anyone on the path can capture the deployment credential. Prefer deploying over HTTPS to a repository manager. The plugin refuses ftp:// (and http://) deployment URLs to non-loopback hosts by default; deploying over FTP requires an explicit -Dmaven.deploy.allowInsecureUrl=true opt-out. Note also that the default Maven Resolver transport does not support FTP at all: you must switch to the wagon transport (-Dmaven.resolver.transport=wagon) in addition to declaring the extension below.

In order to deploy artifacts using FTP you must first specify the use of an FTP server in the distributionManagement element of your POM as well as specifying an extension in your build element which will pull in the FTP artifacts required to deploy with FTP:

<project>
  ...
  <distributionManagement>
    <repository>
      <id>ftp-repository</id>
      <url>ftp://repository.mycompany.com/repository</url>
    </repository>
  </distributionManagement>

  <build>
    <extensions>
      <!-- Enabling the use of FTP -->
      <extension>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.wagon</groupId>
         <artifactId>wagon-ftp</artifactId>
         <version>1.0-beta-6</version>
      </extension>
    </extensions>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

Your settings.xml would contain a server element where the id of that element matches id of the FTP repository specified in the POM above. Store the password in encrypted form rather than as clear text:

<settings>
  ...
  <servers>
    <server>
      <id>ftp-repository</id>
      <username>my-user</username>
      <password>{encrypted-password}</password>
    </server>
  </servers>
  ...
</settings>

You should, of course, make sure that you can login into the specified FTP server by hand before attempting the deployment with Maven. Once you have verified that everything is setup correctly you can now deploy your artifacts using Maven:

mvn deploy