chef-zero | memory Chef server for testing and solo purposes | Configuration Management library

I am trying to understand how to correctly work with environment attributes in recipes. Note: I understand that my approach may not be Chef's best practices; however, my goal is to understand data flow here, not to necessarily use my approach in a production application.

Some details:

1. I am using Vagrant and Chef -- specifically, the chef-zero provisioner (Thus I must use ruby files for my environments rather than JSON due to a chef-vagrant limitation).
2. Here is my directory structure:

1. I am using Vagrant and chef-zero; chef server is not part of my equation
2. I have two roles: base and infrastructure, and two cookbooks: apt and php. The purpose of the base role is to do some basic provisioning and package management and to clone a repository from github, etc. The apt cookbook has a recipe, update_upgrade.rb which runs an execute resource to effectively call apt update, apt upgrade, apt-get autoremove and so forth
3. The infrastructure role sets up PHP via the php cookbook. It'll include more later, but it serves as a good example of the need I have.
4. The php cookbook has two recipes: add_repository.rb and install.rb. The add_repository recipe runs an execute resource to add the ondrej/php repository to apt. The install recipe iterates over a list of packages in order to install php from the added repository. This is where the need for the utility comes into play.

The crux is, I need to run apt update after I add the PHP repo and before I install its packages. What's the best way to achieve this?

Initially, I had my add_repository and install resources combined into a single install recipe and had planned to use include_recipe apt::update_upgrade to insert my apt cookbook's execute resource into that recipe. However, after scouring the chef docs, and this handy article: Should I use include_recipe or add the recipe to run_list?, it seems that include_recipe doesn't run immediately where it's placed. The suggestion in said article was to use a run list to dictate precise execution of recipes, and the chef docs do suggest that the recipes execute in the order they are listed.

This led me to break up the php resources into add_repository and install and to use the following role run list for infrastructure: