The second task below fails with npm not being able to find a package.json within /root/ That is, it doesn't know that it should cd into /root/olio, and so of course it isn't going to find a package.json file.
The git module for some reason creates this directory structure:
/root/\[/root/olio\]/
...which seems to imply the variable isn't interpreted correctly.
I'm also using the root user to login right now because I haven't yet grasped creating users.
---
# roles/olio/vars/main.yml
olio_directory:
- /root/olio
---
# roles/olio/tasks/main.yml
- name: clone olio
- name: use npm to install dependencies
npm: path={{ olio_directory }}