Como cargar Hibernate.Cfg.Xml desde otro directorio

Hibernate.cfg.xml suele estar en el root de tu proyecto, fuera de todo paquete. Si lo pones en otro directorio te aparecerá el siguiente error:

Initial SessionFactory creation failed.org.hibernate.HibernateException: 
/hibernate.cfg.xml not found
 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
 at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:25)
 at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:8)
 at com.mkyong.common.App.main(App.java:11)
Caused by: org.hibernate.HibernateException: /hibernate.cfg.xml not found
 at org.hibernate.util.ConfigHelper.getResourceAsStream(ConfigHelper.java:147)
 at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.getConfigurationInputStream(Configuration.java:1405)
 at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.configure(Configuration.java:1427)
 at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.configure(Configuration.java:1414)
 at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:13)
 ... 2 more

Para decirle a Hibernate como encontrar hibernate.cfg.xml hay que modificar el argumento del método configure() como se muestra a continuación.

            SessionFactory sessionFactory = new Configuration()
            .configure("/com/companyname/example/hibernate.cfg.xml")
            .buildSessionFactory();
 
            return sessionFactory;

HibernateUtil.java

Aquí se muestra un ejemplo completo para cargarlo desde el directorio “/com/companyname/example/“.

import org.hibernate.SessionFactory;
import org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration;
 
public class HibernateUtil {
 
 private static final SessionFactory sessionFactory = buildSessionFactory();
 
 private static SessionFactory buildSessionFactory() {
  try {
   // load from different directory
   SessionFactory sessionFactory = new Configuration().configure(
     "/com/companyname/example/hibernate.cfg.xml")
     .buildSessionFactory();
 
   return sessionFactory;
 
  } catch (Throwable ex) {
   // Make sure you log the exception, as it might be swallowed
   System.err.println("Initial SessionFactory creation failed." + ex);
   throw new ExceptionInInitializerError(ex);
  }
 }
 
 public static SessionFactory getSessionFactory() {
  return sessionFactory;
 }
 
 public static void shutdown() {
  // Close caches and connection pools
  getSessionFactory().close();
 }
 
}

FUENTE: http://www.mkyong.com/hibernate/how-to-load-hibernate-cfg-xml-from-different-directory/