Use pkgdown.offline
In pkgdown.offline: Build 'pkgdown' Websites Offline

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

pkgdown.offline supports offline builds of pkgdown websites. It implements identically named functions to mask the original site initialization and site building functions for convenient drop-in replacements in your environment-constrained development or CI/CD workflows that cannot access the internet.

Try it out locally

To test the offline build workflow, first clear the pkgdown external frontend dependencies cache that might exist in your environment:

pkgdown.offline::clear_cache()

Create a new package. For example:

usethis::create_package(file.path(tempdir(), "pkg"))

Switch off internet connection. In the new project, run:

usethis::use_pkgdown()
pkgdown.offline::build_site()

Use in production environments

In practice, you can replace pkgdown::build_site() calls with pkgdown.offline::build_site() in your wrapper function or CI/CD workflow to achieve offline builds. Similarly, you can use pkgdown.offline::init_site() if a pkgdown::init_site() step was involved in your workflow.