Hibernate Tips: How to bootstrap Hibernate with Spring Boot

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Hibernate Tips is a series of posts in which I describe a quick and easy solution for common Hibernate questions. If you have a question for a future Hibernate Tip, please leave a comment below.

Question:

How do I bootstrap Hibernate in my Spring Boot application?

Solution:

Spring Boot makes it extremely easy to bootstrap Hibernate. You just need to add the Spring Boot JPA starter to your classpath, and Spring Boot handles the bootstrapping for you.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>

You also need to add a database-specific JDBC driver to the classpath of your application. Please check your database documentation for more information.

You define your data source with a few properties in the application.properties file. The following configuration example defines a data source that connects to a PostgreSQL database on localhost.

spring.datasource.url = jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/recipes
spring.datasource.username = postgres
spring.datasource.password = postgres

If you add an H2, HSQL, or Derby database on the classpath, you can safely omit the configuration, and Spring Boot starts and connects to an in-memory database. You can also add multiple JDBC drivers and an in-memory database to your classpath and use different configurations for different target environments.

That’s all you need to do bootstrap Hibernate in a Spring Boot application. You can now use the @Autowired annotation to inject an EntityManager.

@Autowired
private EntityManager em;

Learn More

JPA and Hibernate also provide their own bootstrapping APIs. I explain Hibernate’s native API in more detail in: Hibernate Tip: How to use Hibernate’s native bootstrapping API.