cabal-dev is a tool for managing development builds of Haskell projects. It supports maintaining sandboxed cabal-install repositories, and sandboxed ghc package databases.

By default, it uses a cabal-dev directory under the current working directory as the sandbox.

For most packages, just use cabal-dev instead of cabal, and you will get a sandboxed build that will not install anything (even automatically installed dependencies) into the user or global ghc package databases.

If your build depends on patched or unreleased libraries, you can add them to your sandboxed build environment by installing them to the sandbox directly:so

cd /path/to/dependency
cabal-dev install --sandbox=/path/to/sandbox

Then build your library/application with the specified sandbox.

Additional documentation can be found in the README.md on github:

http://github.com/creswick/cabal-dev/blob/master/README.md