Secret Santa's little helper

Written by jvlsg

This is a small CLI utility to create a Secret Santa game, sending notifications via a SMTP.

Quick-start

New Game

• First, create a .csv file (default name players.csv) with the names and emails of the players with name,email as the first line. See the see players_example.csv file

python3 secret_santa new

This creates a new "Game File" (saved as "game.yml" by default, but you can change it).

A "Game File" is a yaml stores the giver-reciever order, with base64 obsfuscated (i.e. not human readable) names.

Email participants

Do a --dryrun to see if you can successfully connect to your SMTP server

python3 secret_santa email --dryrun ORGANIZER SERVER

Where

• ORGANIZER is the email address of the organizer, e.g. cecile@example.com
• SERVER is the SMTP server of your email provider, e.g. smtp.example.com

Please notice

You will be prompted for your email password, this is used to authenticate to the SMTP server to send the emails.

Feel free to look at the messager.py to see how the password is handled.

Once you're good to go, you can email each participant using running the above command without the --dryrun flag

Post-game review

python3 secret_santa load

Will load the game file, decode the base64, print it's results and save them in a a _decoded.yml file

The participants will also recieve in the email message a "game code" which is a SHA256 hex digest of the game file.

You can use the hash and the load command to make the game as trasparent as possible, not that anyone will care