I’ve redone the vanilla setup. Things worked, however my attempt to have both staging and production on the same droplet was were I got stuck. It was my assuming the ansible setup was intended for this but (as you mentioned) 2 separate droplets are preferred. 1 for staging and the 2nd for production.
Reading this thread things became more clear Staging and Production on same VPS - #8 by btamm
If I am going to have staging and production on the same server I can ignore the staging and use a subdomain that is defined in the production group__vars.
FInal assumption, if I go with the above I would then run
./deploy.sh production mysite.com
./deploy.sh production staging.mysite.com
Is there a way to target a specific branch on deploy?