Wireless sensor network (WSN) studies have been carried out for multiple years. At this stage, many real WSNs have been deployed. Therefore, configuration and updating are critical issues. In this paper, we discuss the issues of configuring and updating a wireless sensor network (WSN). Due to a large number of sensor nodes, in addition to the limited resources of each node, manual configuring turns out to be impossible. Therefore, various auto-configuration approaches have been proposed to address the above challenges. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of auto-configuration mechanisms with the taxonomy of classifications of the existing studies. For each category, we discuss and compare the advantages and disadvantages of related schemes. Lastly, future works are discussed for the remaining issues in this topic.