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-2.5.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.