Database Auditing in Spring Boot with Hibernate Envers and Liquibase

Database Auditing in Spring Boot with Hibernate Envers and Liquibase

Auditing is critical in modern applications — knowing who changed what and when can save you during debugging, compliance checks, or security investigations. Hibernate Envers provides an easy way to track entity changes, while Liquibase helps manage database schema evolution. Together, they make a powerful duo for database auditing in Spring Boot.

In this post, we’ll implement Hibernate Envers in a Spring Boot project and use Liquibase to handle the schema changes it requires.

1. Add Dependencies

In your pom.xml (Maven):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-envers</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.liquibase</groupId>
    <artifactId>liquibase-core</artifactId>
</dependency>

For Gradle:

implementation 'org.hibernate:hibernate-envers'
implementation 'org.liquibase:liquibase-core'

2. Annotate Entities for Auditing

Mark the entity you want to track with @Audited. Hibernate Envers will automatically create audit tables and track changes.

import jakarta.persistence.*;
import org.hibernate.envers.Audited;
@Entity
@Audited
public class…