Once SiteMesh has been downloaded (or built), configuration is simple.

- Setup a web-app as usual (or skip all this by using the pre-configured sitemesh-blank.war).
- Copy `sitemesh-2.4.2.jar` into `[web-app]/WEB-INF/lib`.
- Create the file `[web-app]/WEB-INF/decorators.xml` that contains the following:

  > `<decorators>
  > </decorators>`

- (Optional) Create the file `[web-app]/WEB-INF/sitemesh.xml` that contains the following:

      <sitemesh>
          <property name="decorators-file" value="/WEB-INF/decorators.xml" />
          <excludes file="${decorators-file}" />

          <page-parsers>
              <parser content-type="text/html"
                  class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.parser.HTMLPageParser" />
              <parser content-type="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"
                  class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.parser.HTMLPageParser" />
          </page-parsers>

          <decorator-mappers>
              <mapper class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.mapper.ConfigDecoratorMapper">
                  <param name="config" value="${decorators-file}" />
              </mapper>
          </decorator-mappers>
      </sitemesh>

- Add the following to `[web-app]/WEB-INF/web.xml` within the `<web-app>` tag:

      <filter>
          <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>
          <filter-class>com.opensymphony.sitemesh.webapp.SiteMeshFilter</filter-class>
      </filter>

      <filter-mapping>
          <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name>
          <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
      </filter-mapping>

That's it! Your web-app is now setup to use SiteMesh, you can now start building decorators.