diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
index 181ea4ab..eb01e82a 100644
--- a/README.rst
+++ b/README.rst
@@ -24,4 +24,29 @@ Pre-requisites
 ==============
 
 If you are using bits directly from git clone, you should make sure
-you have `pyyaml` and `argparse` in your python distribution.
+you have the dependencies installed. The easiest way to do this is to run::
+
+    pip install -e .
+
+
+For developers
+==========
+
+If you want to contribute to bits, you can run the tests with::
+
+    pip install -e .[test] # Only needed once
+    tox
+
+The test suite only runs fully on a Linux system, but there is a reduced suite for macOS, runnable with::
+
+    tox -e darwin
+
+You can also run only the unit tests (it's a lot faster than the full suite) with::
+
+    pytest
+
+To run the documentation locally, you can use::
+
+    pip install -e .[docs]
+    cd docs
+    mkdocs serve
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index d2e5c506..b37d3bcb 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -36,6 +36,16 @@ dependencies = [
   'boto3<1.36.0',
 ]
 
+[project.optional-dependencies]
+test = [
+'tox',
+]
+docs = [
+'mkdocs',
+'mkdocs-material',
+'mkdocs-redirects',
+]
+
 [project.urls]
 homepage = 'https://github.com/bitsorg/bits'