For most maven plugins, I can just register the plug-in in my maven.xml, and the plugin will execute. With the cactus plugin, I added the plugin to maven.xml: <postGoal name="xdoc:register-reports"> ... <attainGoal name="maven-cactus-plugin:register"/> </postGoal> ...and added the report to project.xml: <reports> ... <report>maven-cactus-plugin</report> </reports> When I run maven site:generate, it does NOT run cactus:test. It does try to run cactus:report, and fails (can't find TESTS-TestSuites-Cactus.xml). I tried to work around the issue by adding the following to maven.xml: <preGoal name="cactus:report"> <attainGoal name="cactus:test"/> </preGoal> However, when I do this, it seems like cactus is never able to start Tomcat ("Failed to start the container after more than [180000] ms.") - very bizarre. My current workaround is to make sure I add a cactus:test to my list of goals: maven clean cactus:test site:generate However, when I do that, many of the goals are executed more than once, for example java:compile, test:compile and test:test!