patcon's sandbox: Ariadne: Vagrant-based Drupal Development Toolchain

Remember, Ariadne, you are the dreamer, you build this world. I am the subject, my mind populates it.

-- Cobb, Inception

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.

How It Works

Vagrant uses Virtualbox to boot a stripped-down VM image, and then uses the Chef configuration management tool (one of the few components installed on the VM initially) to bring that blank slate into a fully configured state.

The VM will be configured identically whether installed on Mac or Linux. (Theoretically, Vagrant supports Windows as well, although Ariadne is untested in this respect.)

Development

This is a mirror of the GitHub repository, where development is active:
http://github.com/myplanetdigital/ariadne