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+Bootstrapping
+=============
+
+Flit is itself packaged using Flit, as are some foundational packaging tools
+such as ``pep517``. So where can you start if you need to install everything
+from source?
+
+.. note::
+
+   For most users, ``pip`` handles all this automatically. You should only need
+   to deal with this if you're building things entirely from scratch, such as
+   putting Python packages into another package format.
+
+The key piece is ``flit_core``. This is a package which can build itself using
+nothing except Python and the standard library. From an unpacked source archive,
+you can make a wheel by running::
+
+    python -m flit_core.wheel
+
+And then you can install this wheel with the ``bootstrap_install.py`` script
+included in the sdist (or by unzipping it to the correct directory)::
+
+    # Install to site-packages for this Python:
+    python bootstrap_install.py dist/flit_core-*.whl
+
+    # Install somewhere else:
+    python bootstrap_install.py --installdir /path/to/site-packages dist/flit_core-*.whl
+
+As of version 3.6, flit_core bundles the ``tomli`` TOML parser, to avoid a
+dependency cycle. If you need to unbundle it, you will need to special-case
+installing flit_core and/or tomli to get around that cycle.
+
+After ``flit_core``, I recommend that you get `installer
+<https://pypi.org/project/installer/>`_ set up. You can use
+``python -m flit_core.wheel`` again to make a wheel, and then use installer
+itself (from the source directory) to install it.
+
+After that, you probably want to get `build <https://pypi.org/project/build/>`_
+and its dependencies installed as the goal of the bootstrapping phase. You can
+then use ``build`` to create wheels of any other Python packages, and
+``installer`` to install them.