I use maven 3.0.3 and have tried to generate pom for third-party jar like this:
mvn install:install-file -Dfile=cobra.jar -DgroupId=com.cobra -DartifactId=cobra -Dversion=0.98.4 -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
According to link below it should generate proper pom.xml and install artifact in the repo. http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-install-plugin/examples/generic-pom-generation.html
Meanwhile, it returns such a error:
[ERROR] The goal you specified requires a project to execute but there is no POM in this directory (D:\cobra-0.98.4\lib). Please verify you invoked Maven from the correct directory. -> [Help 1]
Why is it asking for pom.xml while it should generate pom.xml?
Answer
This is an old question, but was a serious PITA for me for a few minutes, so I thought I'd share:
I just ran into this problem, and I believe that the issue is probably platform-dependent. The real tip-off was that the solution from Cyril's answer wasn't working as expected: despite my specification of -DgroupId=com.xyz and -DartifactId=whatever on the command-line and the corresponding entry in the POM file, the jar was installed in the local repo under com/whatever.
This led me to experiment with quoting command-line arguments, and the eventual correct result from formatting the command-line like this (after deleting the POM file):
mvn install:install-file "-Dfile=cobra.jar" "-DgroupId=com.cobra" "-DartifactId=cobra" "-Dversion=0.98.4" "-Dpackaging=jar" "-DgeneratePom=true"
Some of the quoting is doubtless redundant, but better safe than sorry, right? I happen to be running Vista on this computer, and would not be surprised if this problem were specific to this OS version...by the way, this was with Maven v3.0.4.