Make sure that you have a working Erlang/OTP release, preferably R12B3 or later.

Get the webmachine code:

svn checkout http://webmachine.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ webmachine-read-only

Build webmachine and mochiweb:

cd webmachine-read-only
make
(cd deps/mochiweb ;make)

Create, build, and start the skeleton resource:

./scripts/new_webmachine.erl mywebdemo /tmp
cd /tmp/mywebdemo
make
./start.sh

Take a look! Point a web browser at http://localhost:8000/

To make this resource handle URI paths other than /, modify the Dispatch term in /tmp/mywebdemo/src/mywebdemo_sup.erl; to make that resource to more interesting things, modify the resource itself at /tmp/mywebdemo/src/mywebdemo_resource.erl.

To learn how to do more interesting things, read the rest of this wiki.