diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 9c105432f..42f41c60c 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -37,14 +37,13 @@ A pull request for which you do not need to contact us in advance is the additio
 Most of Jupytext's code is written in Python. To develop the Python part of Jupytext, you should clone Jupytext, then create a dedicated Python env:
 ```
 cd jupytext
-conda create -n jupytext-dev jupyterlab pyyaml
+conda env create --file environment.yml
 conda activate jupytext-dev
-pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
+pip install -e .
 ```
 
-Tests are executed with `pytest`. Install `pytest-xdist` to allow running the tests in parallel:
+Tests are executed with `pytest`. You can run them in parallel with for instance
 ```
-pip install pytest-xdist
 pytest -n 5
 ``` 
 
diff --git a/environment.yml b/environment.yml
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..5d3cff212
--- /dev/null
+++ b/environment.yml
@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+name: jupytext-dev
+channels:
+  - default
+  - conda-forge
+dependencies:
+  - python==3.7
+  - jupyter
+  - pyyaml
+  - nbconvert
+  - jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
+  - pytest
+  - pytest-xdist
+  - pylint
+  - flake8
+  - black
+  - autopep8
+  - sphinx-gallery
+  - nodejs
+  - pip
+  - setuptools
+  - pandoc