Decentralized Santa

This repo is intended to help you run a secret santa over distance without one person knowing who get everyone else (including who got them!).

This doesn't work as intended yet! You have to go to your Google Security settings and turn on Less secure app access. This is the first thing I aim to change.

Broadly speaking, we will follow this guide for sending emails with Python.

Requirements

Python 2.6 or greater (and pip)
A Google account with Gmail enabled

Setup

First, you need to follow the Quickstart Guide for Gmail's Python API. In particular, click the Enable the Gmail API button. You'll follow a couple prompts to set up a Cloud Platform project, and in particular generate a credentials.json file that will need to be put in this project directory.

DO NOT UPLOAD THE CREDENTIALS FILE ANYWHERE.

Next, you need to install a few Python packages. I will be using conda as a virtual environment manager, but do whatever it is you do to create a virtual environment, then use pip to add the packages in the Guide.

conda create --name santa
pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib

Participants

In order to create a Secret Santa distribution, the program needs to know who is participating and who lives in the same house (and therefore shouldn't get each other). This is done by creating a contacts.csv file with three columns: name, email, and household.

The name column is how that participant will be addressed in emails.

The email column is the contact used to email.

The household column can be left blank if the person is not in a household; otherwise it's treated as a text tag that doesn't allow two people with the same tag to match.

Here is an example contacts.csv file:

Kyle,me@gmail.com,MyHouse
Wife,wife@gmail.com,MyHouse
Sister,sister@hotmail.com,In-Law
Bro-In-Law,bil@yahoo.com,In-Law
LilSis,lilsis@gmail.com,

You can see that LilSis has no household; she doesn't live with anyone participating in the process, so doesn't need a group label.

Testing

Now we want to test that the process works.

TODO