Evaluate assumption that the tool is in /opt

[pleia2]

One of the challenges that developers bump into when developing locally, especially in a very local or containerized environment, is the assumption that the Software Discovery Tool is located in /opt.

This is hard-coded throughout the application, and also may not reflect what users ultimately want to do when they deploy this application in production anyway.

This issue is to review the prevalence of this assumption throughout the code, and then come up with ideas for how to tackle it.

[Gitjay11]

Hi @pleia2

I'd like to work on this, I audited the codebase and found the hardcoded /opt/software-discovery-tool path in ~27 places across Python scripts, Apache config, Dockerfile, and docs.
I'm proposing a approach: auto-detect the base path from the script's location (file), with an optional SDT_BASE environment variable override. I have some ques before i open a PR :

1. Does the hybrid (auto-detect + env var override) approach sound good?
2. Should we keep /opt/software-discovery-tool as a fallback default for backward compatibility?
3. For sdt.conf, should we convert it to a template or use Apache's PassEnv/SetEnv?
   Looking forward to your feedback, Thanks.

[pleia2]

Hi @Gitjay11 Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful response to this issue!

I recently had a chat with @vmuralictr and he actually suggested we do a bit of an overhaul to the Flask+Apache component of this tool, which would make a lot of the changes that would go into this issue unnecessary. Since I don't want you to spend your precious time on something that we may remove very soon anyway, I think we're going to shelve this particular issue until we have a better idea of how we're going to rework the back end.

[Gitjay11]

Hii @pleia2
Thanks for letting me know. I completely understand. An overhaul of the Flask/Apache backend sounds like a great direction. I'll hold off on this for now. Looking forward to seeing the new changes and I'll look for other issues I can help with.