Surefire needs Maven 3 to be built. But in order to test it tests, you can do: * -DmavenHomeUsed= path to a Maven 2.x home * or -Pmaven-2.2.1, this profile will download a Maven 2.2.1 distrib and use it for integration tests. In order to run tests for a release check during the vote the following memory requirements are needed: export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx2048m -Xms1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Djava.awt.headless=true" Deploying web site ------------------ see http://maven.apache.org/developers/website/deploy-component-reference-documentation.html