Using the ADAFRUIT_DHT python library from https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_DHT and a DHT22 temp/humidity sensor (https://www.adafruit.com/products/393) I'm able to easily read temperature and humidity values.
The problem is, that I need to run my script as root, in order to interact with the GPIO pins. This is simply not possible, when running my script through a website, via wsgi, as apache will not let me (for good reason) set the WSGIDaemonProcess's user to root.
I've got pigpiod running which allows me to interact with the GPIO through it, as a non-root user, however, the ADAFRUIT_DHT doesn't go through the daemon, and interacts directly with the GPIO. I'm not 100% sure the pigpio daemon would be fast enough for the bit-banging, required to decode the response from the DHT22 unit, but, perhaps.
So, is there a way for me to coerce the ADAFRUIT_DHT library to not require being run as root, or, are there alternatives to the library available that might accomplish what I'm looking for?
Create a small server that runs as root and listens on a local Unix or TCP socket. When another process connects, your server reads the data from sensor and returns it.
Now your WSGI process only needs permissions to connect to the listening socket, which can be easily managed either via permissions on a Unix socket, or simply throwing access control to the wind and opening a TCP socket bound to the localhost address (so that only processes on the local machine can connect).
There are several advantages to doing this...for example, you can now have multiple programs consuming the temperature data at the same time, and not need to worry about device contention (because only the temperature server is actually reading the data). You can even implement short-term caching to provide faster responses.
Also, note that there is a raspberry pi specific stackexchange.