Ansible doesn’t pick up group_vars without loading it manually

You’re confusing the structure a bit.

• The group_vars directory contains files for each hostgroup defined in your inventory file. The files define variables that member hosts can use.
• The inventory file doesn’t reside in the group_vars dir, it should be outside.
• Only hosts that are members of a group can use its variables, so unless you put 127.0.0.1 in a group, it won’t be able to use any group_vars beside those defined in group_vars/all.

What you want is this dir structure:

group_vars/
   all
   perlservers
   phl-stage
hosts
site.yml
local.yml

Your hosts file should look like this, assuming 127.0.0.1 is just a staging server and not perl or web server:

[webservers]
phl-web1
phl-web2

[perlservers]
phl-perl1
phl-perl2

[phl-stage]
127.0.0.1

[phl-stage:children]
webservers
perlservers

So you define which hosts belong to which group in the inventory, and then for each group you define variables in its group_vars file.