## 3. Bootstrap

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The term bootstrapping refers to initializing and starting a software component.
In Hibernate, we are specifically talking about the process of building a fully functional `SessionFactory` instance or `EntityManagerFactory` instance, for JPA.
The process is very different for each.

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This chapter will not focus on all the possibilities of bootstrapping.
Those will be covered in each specific more-relevant chapters later on.
Instead, we focus here on the API calls needed to perform the bootstrapping.

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During the bootstrap process, you might want to customize Hibernate behavior so make sure you check the [Configurations](#configurations) section as well.

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