Bootstrapping Hibernate 5 with Spring | Code Factory

3 min readApr 9, 2020

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1. Overview

In this article, we’ll discuss how to bootstrap Hibernate 5 with Spring, using both Java and XML configuration.

2. Spring Integration

Bootstrapping a SessionFactory with the native Hibernate API is a bit complicated and would take us quite a few lines of code (have a look at the official documentation in case you really need to do that).

Fortunately, Spring supports bootstrapping the SessionFactory – so that we only need a few lines of Java code or XML configuration.

Also, before we jump in, if you’re working with older versions of Hibernate, you can have a look at the articles about Hibernate 3 as well as Hibernate 4 with Spring.

3. Maven Dependencies

Let’s get started by first adding the necessary dependencies to our pom.xml :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
    <version>5.4.2.Final</version>
</dependency>

The spring-orm module provides the Spring integration with Hibernate :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-orm</artifactId>
    <version>5.1.6.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

We’ll use MySQL as our database :

<dependency>
    <groupId>mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
    <version>5.1.6</version>
</dependency>

Finally, we are going to use Tomcat JDBC Connection Pooling, which fits better for production purposes than the DriverManagerDataSource provided by Spring :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat-dbcp</artifactId>
    <version>9.0.1</version>
</dependency>

4. Configuration

As mentioned before, Spring supports us with bootstrapping the Hibernate SessionFactory.

All we have to do is to define some beans as well as a few parameters.

With Spring, we have two options for these configurations, a Java-based and an XML-based way.

4.1. Using Java Configuration

For using Hibernate 5 with Spring, little has changed since Hibernate 4: we have to use LocalSessionFactoryBean from the package org.springframework.orm.hibernate5 instead of org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.

Like with Hibernate 4 before, we have to define beans for LocalSessionFactoryBean, DataSource, and PlatformTransactionManager, as well as some Hibernate-specific properties.

Let’s create our DBConfiguration class to configure Hibernate 5 with Spring:

package com.codeFactory.configuration;import java.util.Properties;import javax.sql.DataSource;import org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp2.BasicDataSource;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.HibernateTransactionManager;
import org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.LocalSessionFactoryBean;
import org.springframework.transaction.PlatformTransactionManager;
import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.EnableTransactionManagement;@Configuration
@EnableTransactionManagement
public class DBConfiguration {@Bean
    public LocalSessionFactoryBean sessionFactory() {
        LocalSessionFactoryBean sessionFactory = new LocalSessionFactoryBean();
        sessionFactory.setDataSource(dataSource());
        sessionFactory.setPackagesToScan("com.codeFactory");
        sessionFactory.setHibernateProperties(hibernateProperties());
        return sessionFactory;
    }@Bean
 public DataSource dataSource() {
  BasicDataSource dataSource = new BasicDataSource();
  dataSource.setDriverClassName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
  dataSource.setUrl("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test_connection");
  dataSource.setUsername("root");
  dataSource.setPassword("root");
  return dataSource;
 }@Bean
 public PlatformTransactionManager hibernateTransactionManager() {
  HibernateTransactionManager transactionManager = new HibernateTransactionManager();
  transactionManager.setSessionFactory(sessionFactory().getObject());
  return transactionManager;
 }private final Properties hibernateProperties() {
  Properties hibernateProperties = new Properties();
  hibernateProperties.setProperty("hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto", "update");
  hibernateProperties.setProperty("hibernate.dialect", "org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect");
  return hibernateProperties;
 }
}

4.2. Using XML Configuration

As a secondary option, we can also configure Hibernate 5 with an XML-based configuration :

hibernate5Configuration.xml (create file in src/main/resources)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
 xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
 xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd 
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop 
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop.xsd
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx.xsd">
 
 <bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
        <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.codeFactory"/>
        <property name="hibernateProperties">
            <props>
                <prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">
                    update
                </prop>
                <prop key="hibernate.dialect">
                    org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect
                </prop>
            </props>
        </property>
    </bean>
 
    <bean id="dataSource"
      class="org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp2.BasicDataSource">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
        <property name="url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test_connection"/>
        <property name="username" value="root"/>
        <property name="password" value="root"/>
    </bean>
 
    <bean id="txManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate5.HibernateTransactionManager">
        <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
    </bean>
 
</beans>

As we can easily see, we’re defining exactly the same beans and parameters as in the Java-based configuration earlier.

To bootstrap the XML into the Spring context, we can use a simple Java configuration file if the application is configured with Java configuration :

package com.codeFactory.configuration;import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ImportResource;
import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.EnableTransactionManagement;@Configuration
@EnableTransactionManagement
@ImportResource({"classpath:hibernate5Configuration.xml"})
public class DBConfiguration {}

Alternatively, we can simply provide the XML file to the Spring Context, if the overall configuration is purely XML.

5. Usage

At this point, Hibernate 5 is fully configured with Spring, and we can inject the raw HibernateSessionFactory directly whenever we need to :

package com.codeFactory.controller;import org.hibernate.SessionFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;@RestController
public class Controller {@Autowired
 SessionFactory sessionFactory;}