Can I execute maven plugin whith Eclipse m2e UPDATE?

Question

I have a maven project and I want to ask Eclipse to copy a dependency jar to WEB-INF/lib when I do right click -> Maven -> Update Project ...
By using the following plugin, I can copy the jar doing mvn validate. But what I want is executing this plugin when I do Maven -> Update Project ... with m2e

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.1</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <phase>validate</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>copy</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <configuration>
                        <artifactItems>
                            <artifactItem>
                                <groupId>com.test.repo</groupId>
                                <artifactId>myDependencyJar</artifactId>
                                <overWrite>true</overWrite>
                                <outputDirectory>${basedir}/WebContent/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
                            </artifactItem>
                        </artifactItems>
                        <outputDirectory>${basedir}/WebContent/WEB-INF/lib</outputDirectory>
                        <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
                        <overWriteSnapshots>true</overWriteSnapshots>
                    </configuration>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Answer 1

The Maven -> Update Project does not execute Maven at all. It just updates the Eclipse project with the data from the pom.xml file. So I would say it is not possible to execute a Maven plugin by that mean.

More on "Maven -> Update" here .