The first step to using Lift is to make sure you’ve got Java 1.6 or better installed on your machine... you’ll need tar or zip as well.

Download the TAR or Zip version of the Lift templates and extract the files.

Copy the lift_basic project into another directory called first_lift.

cd into first_lift and type sbt. It will take a few minutes for sbt, the Simple Build Tool, to download all the depedencies. At the > prompt type update which will download Lift and everything else you need to get started. Once all that stuff is downloaded, type jetty-run and point your browser to http://localhost:8080 and you’ll see a live application. To continuously update your running application as you to code, enter ~prepare-webapp at the sbt prompt.