Set plugin’s version on the command line in Maven 2
If you don’t want to run the latest version of a plugin installed in your local repository, you need to set the version number. And for that, you need to specify a fully-qualified goal in the form of: mvn groupID:artifactID:version:goal So in your case: mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-checkstyle-plugin:2.5:checkstyle