Ansible variables scope clash

Question

I've got an ansible setup that looks like this

inventories/
    sandbox1
    group_vars/
       all
       sandbox1
pb/
    pb1/
        run_pb1.yml

I've got roles and other stuff too, but I think this is enough to capture the gist of what I need to do.

I've got a variable foo that I am defining inside inventories/group_vars/all AND inventories/group_vars/sandbox1

Now my issue is that whenever I call

ansible-playbook -i inventories/sandbox1 pb/pb1/run_pb1.yml

The playbook is run with the value of foo that is contained in inventories/group_vars/all... put another way, foo is not being picked up from the inventories/group_vars/sandbox1

Is this the correct way to implement an inventory specific variable? I want to avoid creating mulitple playbooks for something as simple as a variable change... ie, I do not want to do something like this inside the "all" file

default_foo: bar
sandbox1_foo: baz

along with multiple playbooks, which would be the same except for the variable they reference.

Is there a way to do what I am asking?

Answer 1

Host variables overriding group variables (see docs) but you should define them in /host_vars directory. So eg using following setup:

.
├── group_vars
│   └── all.yml # foo: var_from_all
├── hosts
├── host_vars
│   └── host1.yml # foo: var_from_host1
└── test.yml

You will get:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts test.yml 

PLAY [host1,host2] *************************************************************

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [host1] => {
    "foo": "var_from_host1"
}
ok: [host2] => {
    "foo": "var_from_all"
}