Choosing the right Maven Phase

The plugin is not bound to a Maven phase by default, so you have to choose one. Generally we use either site or site-deploy. The site phase is used by Maven to compute the project reports, and generate the site. The site-deploy phase happens after the site phase and is responsible for the upload of the site. Even if the site-deploy phase makes more sense, it requires some extra-configuration.

Using the site phase

To use the site phase, just configure the plugin as follows:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.github.github</groupId>
    <artifactId>site-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.9</version>
    <configuration>
        <!-- the configuration goes here -->
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>site</goal>
            </goals>
            <!-- use the site phase -->
            <phase>site</phase>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

However be aware that any site generation, even to check the current state, triggers the site upload.

Using the site-deploy phase

Instead of the site phase, you can use the site-deploy phase:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.github.github</groupId>
    <artifactId>site-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.9</version>
    <configuration>
        <!-- the configuration goes here -->
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>site</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>site-deploy</phase>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

However, the regular maven-site-plugin is also bound to the site-deploy phase, and triggers the regular site upload. If you are using the Github Site Plugin you probably don’t want to use the traditional upload feature, and so you must disable it:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.3</version>
    <configuration>
        <skipDeploy>true</skipDeploy>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

With this configuration, you site is uploaded to Github in the site-deploy phase as expected and without conflicting with the regular maven-site-plugin behavior.