 <p>Though it looks less elegant, but switching to antrun plugin should works:</p> <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;plugin&gt; &lt;artifactId&gt;maven-antrun-plugin&lt;/artifactId&gt; &lt;executions&gt; &lt;execution&gt; &lt;id&gt;runSomething&lt;/id&gt; &lt;phase&gt;package&lt;/phase&gt; &lt;goals&gt; &lt;goal&gt;run&lt;/goal&gt; &lt;/goals&gt; &lt;configuration&gt; &lt;target&gt; &lt;property name="runtime_classpath" refid="maven.runtime.classpath"/&gt; &lt;java classname="org.drrabbit.maventest.App" fork="true" failonerror="true" maxmemory="512m"&gt; &lt;classpath&gt; &lt;pathelement path="${project.build.directory}/some/extra/resources" /&gt; &lt;pathelement path="${runtime_classpath}" /&gt; &lt;/classpath&gt; &lt;/java&gt; &lt;/target&gt; &lt;/configuration&gt; &lt;/execution&gt; &lt;/executions&gt; &lt;/plugin&gt; </code></pre> <p>However, it doesn't seems a good idea to have the extra resources put in somewhere outside the project, as your op suggested. You should either consider putting that as part of the project, or make it a jar and deploy to maven repo so you can put it as a plugin dependency.</p>