Feature request: Offline installs

[felixSchl]

It would be nice if I could install packages from local cache, similar to what bower i -o provided

[justinwoo]

You could instead use https://github.com/justinwoo/psc-package2nix to work with stores of packages

[felixSchl]

I think a out-of-the-box solution would be preferable and should not add a tremendous amount of complexity. I'd be happy to try and contribute a patch if we can agree on something. To iterate the motivation a little: I happen to work without access to the internet from time to time and not being able to install essentially means I cannot do any work on anything that requires packages to be installed. Since package sets are immutable (in spirit only) we should be able to cache packages locally on disk somewhere, indexed by set and version.

[justinwoo]

Just another stray comment to add, since @damncabbage asked a long time ago a similar question:

One easy solution I had at one point was to create an acme project requiring everything in the universe: https://github.com/justinwoo/acme-spacchetti

The end result of installing literally everything in Spacchetti is still 85MB, then I sometimes copied over my .psc-package folder to various other projects.

It's not perfect, but it's there. Worth revisiting a small explanation of how Psc-Package works for people who want to know how this works: https://spacchetti.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html

[justinwoo]

I think a solution here might be to just replicate the behavior I described in the comment but with explicit arguments on where an offline copy should be downloaded, without changing the behavior of existing commands.