> I understand that packages can be pinned locally using each package’s Git repo and this would work if each package also includes its opam files. I am looking for a way to populate the cache with the tar/zip files that the Opam packages point to.

There are various ways to do it, the easiest one would be to use `opam-admin`:

```
$ git clone https://github.com/ocaml/opam-repository
$ cd opam-repository
$ opam-admin make --resolve [an optional list of packages to limit the size of the cache]
$ opam remote add local-cache .
```