Ariadne is a standardized virtual machine (VM) development environment for easily developing Drupal sites in a local sandbox that is essentially identical to a fully-configured hosted solution. It attempts to emulate a dedicated Acquia/Pantheon server as closely as possible, with added development tools. Once several simple system requirements have been met, it can be set up using only a few commands from your computer's terminal.
The current iteration aims to create a local Vagrant environment that mimics Acquia's infrastructure as closely as possible, using cookbooks and roles that can easily be used to deploy an actual cluster.
Quickstart and DrupalPro provide a large "golden image" of a GUI development environment, whereas Ariadne is just flat files with instructions on configuring a fully configured system from a stripped-down, bare essential "base box" image hosted elsewhere (base box is not specific to Drupal). I've been in touch with Mike Stewart about collaborating further, but it will be a long and significant effort, and it's not clear to me which will most sensibly spawn the spiritual successor.
The Vagrant project on Drupal.org uses Chef to provision, but is modeled after the php quickstart repository created by chef's parent company. Like that project, it basically aims to locally simulate the same clustered LAMP setup locally, but running Drupal. I don't believe it is intended for day-to-day development.
Aegir-Up uses Aegir as a centerpiece of the VM, and has it's own templating language to help it work with Drush. Many of our architectural and aesthetic approaches differ. Most notable, it used Puppet for system provisioning, which isn't my chosen tool.
Drupal-Up is a project I just found right now. It seems to have a subset of Aegir-Up functionality, but without the Aegir focus. It still uses Pupper, which prevents me from contributing.
http://drupal.org/sandbox/patcon/1783838
https://github.com/myplanetdigital/ariadne#readme (much more detail)
To clone (master branch isn't default, but has stable releases -- currently tag "1.2.0")
git clone git.drupal.org:sandbox/patcon/1783838.git --branch master
Drupal version agnostic.
Fixed
other project types
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