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

 public static  ArrayList listfiles(String pckgname) {
       ArrayList classes=new ArrayList();
try{

    // Get a File object for the package 
    File directory=null; 
    try { 
      directory=new File(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResource(pckgname.replace('.', '/')).getFile()); 
    } catch(NullPointerException x) { 
      System.out.println("Nullpointer");
      throw new ClassNotFoundException(pckgname+" does not appear to be a valid package"); 
    } 
    if(directory.exists()) { 
      // Get the list of the files contained in the package 
      String[] files=directory.list(); 
      for(int i=0; i<files.length; i++) { 
// we are only interested in .class files 
if(files[i].endsWith(".class")) { 
  // removes the .class extension 
  classes.add(Class.forName(pckgname+'.'+files[i].substring(0, files[i].length()-6))); 
} 
      } 
    } else { 
System.out.println("Directory does not exist");
      throw new ClassNotFoundException(pckgname+" does not appear to be a valid package"); 
    } 
    Class[] classesA=new Class[classes.size()]; 
    classes.toArray(classesA); 

     //       return classesA;

} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return classes;
}

Answer 2

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<Class<?>> 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.