Hibernate using JPA (annotated Entities) and liquibase

Question

liquibase is a perfect alternative to hibernate's hbm2ddl_auto property if you are using xml-mapping. But Im using JPA annotation (hibernate annotations). Is it possible to use liquibase then?

Answer 1

Yes, Liquibase uses hibernate's metadata classes, which are the same whether you use xml mappings or annotations. You do need a hibernate config file to point liquibase to, but your mappings can be xml or jpa annotations. More information can be found at https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase-hibernate/wiki but you can use "database urls" such as

hibernate:classic:com/example/hibernate.cfg.xml 

if you have a hibernate xml conf file or

hibernate:ejb3:myPersistenceUnit 

if you have a META-INF/persistence.xml, or

hibernate:spring:com.example?dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5Dialect 

if you would like auto-generate a JPA configuration based on a java package containing annotated Entities.