ava-sim makes it easy for anyone to spin up a local instance of an Avalanche network to interact with the Avalanche standard APIs or to test a custom VM.
Detailed instructions can be found on the github README.
This tool is NOT intended to be a full-fledged node automation framework. Rather, it is meant to be a simple tool for anyone to get started with Avalanche.
If you are looking for a more powerful framework, check out avash. This tool lets you run multiple versions of the same binary and provide custom node configs.