Can hibernate scan packages to create SessionFactory automatically?

Question

Can I configure Hibernate to scan packages automatically to create a SessionFactory from @Entity annotated beans ?

Currently I am using

Answer 1

No. You can't say Hibernate to scan packages for persistent classes even with the last Hibernate 5 version. Configuration has method addPackage(), but it is for reading "package-level metadata" (.package-info- files).

You don't want to use Spring, so what can you do:

Using fluent-hibernate

You can use EntityScanner from fluent-hibernate library (you will not need to have other jars, except the library)

For Hibernate 4 and Hibernate 5:

Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
EntityScanner.scanPackages("my.com.entities", "my.com.other.entities")
    .addTo(configuration);
SessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory();

Using a new Hibernate 5 bootstrapping API:

List> classes = EntityScanner
        .scanPackages("my.com.entities", "my.com.other.entities").result();

MetadataSources metadataSources = new MetadataSources();
for (Class annotatedClass : classes) {
    metadataSources.addAnnotatedClass(annotatedClass);
}

SessionFactory sessionFactory = metadataSources.buildMetadata()
    .buildSessionFactory();

Using other libraries

If you already use a library that can be used for scanning, for an example Reflections, there is a test project with examples of using various libraries for entity scanning: hibernate-scanners-test.