standalone-haddock generates standalone haddock Haskell documentation.

When you simply run cabal haddock, the resulting HTML documentation contains hyperlinks to other packages on your system. As a result, you cannot publish it on the internet (well, you can, but the links will be broken).

standalone-haddock takes several packages for which you want to publish documentation. It generates documentation for them with proper links:

• links to identifiers inside this package set are relative
• links to identifiers from external packages lead to hackage

Thus the resulting directory with HTML files is relocatable and publishable.

TL;DR: it just works. See the haskell-suite documentation for an example output.

Usage: standalone-haddock [--package-db DB-PATH] -o OUTPUT-PATH [PACKAGE-PATH]

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  --package-db DB-PATH     Additional package database
  -o OUTPUT-PATH           Directory where html files will be placed

PACKAGE-PATH is the path to the (unpacked) package — i.e. a directory with a .cabal file.

For example:

standalone-haddock -o doc haskell-names haskell-packages haskell-src-exts hse-cpp cabal/Cabal

NOTE: dependencies of every package need to be already installed in the system with documentation (even those dependencies that themselves belong to the current package set). If they are installed in a non-standard package database (e.g. if you use sandboxes), use the --package-db option.

The program only builds with (unreleased) Cabal 1.17 which you can get from github.

I spent some time trying to make it compatible with Cabal 1.16 (see Cabal-1.16 branch), but the API seems to have changed too much.

If you seriously care about this, feel free to send a patch, but it's really easier just to install Cabal HEAD.