I think this is the way to go.

We could do it in vars + bootstrap.yml, but since geerlingguy's role already provides the logic this seems the better solution.

I agree with @seth-shaw-unlv this solution work fine and follow a geerlingguy role-php.

Oddly enough, I just discovered that this doesn't actually work. Ansible doesn't complain and a CentOS provision works, but when I spun up a Debian-based Islandora the apache php library wasn't there. I removed the Debian.yml file altogether and it actually worked then. To be honest, I'm not sure what is going on with the Debian php_packages_extra here.

Alright we can't hack geerlingguy's role, so we need to store these variables using a separate named variable file and include based on ansible_os_family at the start of the bootstrapping. I'm closing this.

Can someone try this out. It seems to work, but then I thought the last attempt worked too 🤣

@whikloj for some reason geerligguy.php role didn't saw /var/RedHat.yml... (in my case)
Note: when I try Ubunty php-Debian.yml installed but php-RedHat.yml do not, but RedHat.yml is installed from /group_var/webserver dir

@whikloj

ERROR! the role 'geerlingguy.mysql' was not found in /home/nat/Desktop/clawtest2/claw-playbook/roles:/home/nat/Desktop/clawtest2/claw-playbook/roles/internal:/home/nat/Desktop/clawtest2/claw-playbook/roles/external:/home/nat/Desktop/clawtest2/claw-playbook

The error appears to have been in '/home/nat/Desktop/clawtest2/claw-playbook/database.yml': line 12, column 7, but may
be elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.

The offending line appears to be:

  roles:
    - role: geerlingguy.mysql
      ^ here

May not be related this PR!

@DigitLib / @Natkeeran thanks...I'll try burning my setup down and pulling fresh to see what is happening.

@whikloj this /var files seem to work today. I try it on Manjaro Linux, yesterday it won't on Fedora 26... Tried Ubuntu and CentOS it works on both. Without added gather_facts: false...

Thanks @DigitLib / @Natkeeran, I am getting an error but not until building the Grok dependencies. That was on Centos, I'll tear it down and try again with Ubuntu

@whikloj You can ignore the previous error I posted. I may not have installed the requirements! (was sleeping!).

This PR installs without error, but get the same php error related to missing library:
handle($request); $response->send(); $kernel->terminate($request, $response);

@Natkeeran @mjordan @DigitLib
I ran the playbook with -vvv logging and it appeared that it wasn't actually finding the php_extra_packages variable.

Moving it into the tasks and using include_vars: seems to work, and we can use this as a place to include overlapping variable definitions that need to be different based on OS version.

We could also use more specific files if necessary and the with_first_found argument to the include_vars command.

- name: Load a variable file based on the OS type, or a default if not found. Using free-form to specify the file.
  include_vars: "{{ item }}"
  with_first_found:
    - "{{ ansible_distribution }}.yml"
    - "{{ ansible_os_family }}.yml"
    - "default.yml"

Tested both Ubuntu and CentOS today. Both work for me now.