Cabal: only work with checked in libraries in project directory

According to the cabal docs, you can set active-repositories: none in your cabal.project or cabal file to put cabal-install in offline mode.

Then, you could create a cabal project and try to make all the dependencies that don't come bundled with GHC itself local packages. Clone them in your project folder and add them to the packages: section of cabal.project.

The problem with the above is that running cabal clean would require re-compiling all packages afterwards.

As an alternative, create a local no-index package repository in your offline machine, make it the only available package repository using active-repositories:, and put the sdist tarballs of all your dependencies there.

That way the dependencies will only be compiled once.