The first time you build Maven from source, you have to build Maven without Maven. This Ant script builds a minimal Maven, just enough to re-launch Maven again in this directory and generate an installation assembly. Then we extract the assembly and re-run the Maven build one more time, this time with the full generated Maven. To run this script, you must set the M2_HOME environment variable or the maven.home property to the location that should contain Maven. This directory *must* be named after the maven version you want to install, e.g. /usr/local/maven-2.1-SNAPSHOT. You can set the maven.repo.local property to specify a custom location for your local repository for the bootstrap process. The Maven install destination directory must end with '${maven.home.basename.expected}'. Your M2_HOME was = ${maven.home} We recommend = ${maven.home.recommended} Using Local Repository: ${maven.repo.local} Extracting assembly to ${maven.home.dirname} ... Resolved version ${fileversion} (given=${version})