Incorrect artifact coordinates for Hibernate enhancer with Spring Boot 4

[danthe1st]

The Hibernate enhancement Maven plugin was moved to different artifact coordinates with Hibernate 7 and it seems like start.spring.io tries to use the nonexisting old artifact coordinates.

Steps to reproduce

• Go to start.spring.io
• Add Spring Data JPA and GraalVM native support
• Make sure that Maven and Spring Boot 4.0.0 is selected
• Download the project
• Run mvn verify

The output I get with mvn verify is the following:

[INFO] 
[INFO] 1 problem was encountered while building the effective settings (use -e to see details)
[INFO] 
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Loaded 21683 auto-discovered prefixes for remote repository central (prefixes-central.txt)
[INFO] Loaded 74 auto-discovered prefixes for remote repository apache.snapshots (prefixes-apache.snapshots-c1d4c55f9308e5ac18a4069bed41dca64d85c515.txt)
[INFO] Loaded 21683 auto-discovered prefixes for remote repository maven-central (prefixes-maven-central-de66ab544dabb92499170649134bc3bd0ea8afac.txt)
[INFO] 
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------< com.example:demo >---------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building demo 0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
[INFO]   from pom.xml
[INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------[ jar ]----------------------------------------------------------
Downloading from central: https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/hibernate/orm/tooling/hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin/7.1.8.Final/hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin-7.1.8.Final.pom
[WARNING] The POM for org.hibernate.orm.tooling:hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin:jar:7.1.8.Final is missing, no dependency information available
Downloading from central: https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/org/hibernate/orm/tooling/hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin/7.1.8.Final/hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin-7.1.8.Final.jar
[INFO] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time:  4.634 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2025-11-21T11:30:19+01:00
[INFO] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Plugin org.hibernate.orm.tooling:hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin:7.1.8.Final or one of its dependencies could not be resolved:
[ERROR]         Could not find artifact org.hibernate.orm.tooling:hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin:jar:7.1.8.Final in central (https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2): The following artifacts could not be resolved: org.hibernate.orm.tooling:hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin:jar:7.1.8.Final (absent): Could not find artifact org.hibernate.orm.tooling:hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin:jar:7.1.8.Final in central (https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2)
[ERROR] -> [Help 1]
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the '-e' switch
[ERROR] Re-run Maven using the '-X' switch to enable verbose output
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please read the following articles:
[ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/PluginResolutionException

The problem is start.spring.io adding a reference to the removed plugin:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.hibernate.orm.tooling</groupId>
        <artifactId>hibernate-enhance-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${hibernate.version}</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>enhance</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>enhance</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <enableLazyInitialization>true</enableLazyInitialization>
              <enableDirtyTracking>true</enableDirtyTracking>
              <enableAssociationManagement>true</enableAssociationManagement>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>

The correct artifact coordinates should be org.hibernate.orm:hibernate-maven-plugin according to this. Unfortunately, it seems like the plugin is also unavailable for Hibernate 7.1.8 which is used by Spring Boot 4.0.0. The plugin being unavailable is discussed here but this part is probably outside of start.spring.io's control.

[mhalbritter]

Thanks for letting us know! I've pushed a change that uses org.hibernate.orm:hibernate-maven-plugin when Boot 4 is selected. It still uses ${hibernate.version} as the version, which currently breaks because, as you said, 7.1.8 is missing. This is hopefully fixed with the next version of Spring Boot when we pick up the next hibernate version.

I've also removed the deprecated configuration properties.

I'm also not even sure if we need that plugin anymore. In my tests, GraalVM with Hibernate (i've tested a simple OneToMany and ManyToOne association and it worked. @sdeleuze do you have more insights into why it's needed?

[mhalbritter]

Also somewhat related to #1913.

[mhalbritter]

I gave this a bit more thought and decided to restore the enableAssociationManagement configuration. We're setting this for Gradle too, and shouldn't drop it without further investigation.