Run script with root permission as normal user

Question

Problem:

How can I run a script owned by root with root permission as normal user?

Let's take for example a folder /path/to/folder. First I make sure that the folder and all content is owned by root:

sudo chown -R root:root /path/to/folder

Then I tried different approaches of giving permissions to other users:

sudo chmod -R +x /path/to/folder
sudo chmod -R u+s /path/to/folder
sudo chmod -R 4755 /path/to/folder

But the script I want to run, still gives me:

Can't open /dev/mem: Permission denied

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Detailed

I have a Flask application which changes colours of an led-strip according to incoming requests.

Regardless of which library is used, accessing GPIO always needs root permission.

I would like to change this for two reasons:

• I am using venv and running the app with sudo causes the globally installed python packaged to be used rather than the ones in venv.

• In its finished state the application should run in apache. So far I didn't get apache to run the app with sudo.

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I would like to focus on the main problem, rather than Flask or the led-strip library.

Thanks in advance!

Edit

I looked into the suggested question and my user is in the gpio group, the dev/gpiomem folder exists and has the exact same permissions and still I get the /dev/mem permission denied error.

Now I found out, that the package I am using apparently uses /dev/mem exclusively and doesn't support /dev/gpiomem. (https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x)

I'm now looking for an alternative and I am open for suggestions :-)