Problem assigning variable per environment in Ansible - ansible

Question

I'm building an AMI with packer and providing it with Ansible. The AMI needs to be build with different variables depending on the environment.Therefore I used the below structure based on this article:
├── ansible.cfg
├── bamboo-server-dev.yml
├── environments
├── group_vars
│   ├── bamboo_packer_dev.yml
│   └── bamboo_packer_prod.yml
└── roles/
├── bamboo-server/
│ └── vars/
│   ├── bamboo-dev.yml
│   ├── bamboo-prod.yml
│   └── main.yml
└── ubuntu-server/
My environment file is where I define my inventory and looks like this:
[bamboo_packer_dev]
localhost
[bamboo_packer_prod]
localhost
The group_vars/bamboo_packer_dev.yml looks like the below:
---
# Setup specific variables per environment
environment: "dev"
The playbook bamboo-server-dev.yml looks like this:
---
- hosts: bamboo_packer_dev
become: true
roles:
- ubuntu-server
- bamboo-server
And finally the roles/bamboo-server/vars/main.yml looks like this:
---
# Provide variables according to the environment
- name: provide variables
include_vars:
file: "bamboo-{{ environment }}.yml"
But when I run the playbook I get the following message:
ERROR! failed to combine variables, expected dicts but got a 'dict' and a 'AnsibleSequence':
{}
[{"name": "provide variables", "include_vars": {"file": "bamboo-{{ environment }}.yml"}}]
It seems the "environment" variable is not getting picked up. And I cannot figure it why. Can someone please suggest what might be wrong with my playbook? Or abetter way to achieve this? My Ansible version is 2.9.1 running on Mojave.

Answer 1

Your vars file cannot include ansible tasks, as you have done. Files in vars must be -- as ansible very clearly informed you -- dict and not list, since the keys of the vars file becomes variable names, and [] is not a variable name
Perhaps you meant to put that content into roles/bamboo-server/tasks/main.yml, which will allow you to have include_vars: as an action