Secret Santa 🎅🏻

This project will automatically "pull from a hat" a recipient for every secret Santa and send a notification email to each Santa's inbox of who their gift recipient is 🎁

It ensures that no one knows who their secret Santa is... not even you – unless you really want to know!

Table of Contents

• Configuration

• Usage

  • Perform a dry run

  • Test your SMTP configuration

  • Send the emails

Configuration

Clone the repository and install dependencies via poetry with poetry install, then activate the virtual environment via the poetry shell command.

Make your desired modifications to the config.py configuration file (mostly the email template, optionally a lookup of anyone who should not be someone elses Santa).

Create a .env.secret file with a structure like that of .env.shared and specify:

• the SMTP settings, as specified by your SMTP host;
• the list of secret Santas (names and email addresses).

Usage

Perform a dry run

• python ./secret-santa-mailer.py

This will read the configuration file and perform a "dry run" of the various pairings between secret Santas and recipients. It will generate an output file as specified by the secret_santa_record_file setting in config.py.

This record file is saved as secret-santa-record-file.txt by default.

Test your SMTP configuration

Send a test email to confirm that the SMTP configuration is set up correctly:

• python ./secret-santa-mailer.py --send-test-email you@example.com

If it runs without any error, then you're ready to send the secret Santa emails.

Send the emails

• python ./secret-santa-mailer.py --official

This will sequentially send emails to everyone and record them into the file specified by the secret_santa_record_file setting in config.py.

⚠️ Don't look at this file, unless you want to know who everyone's secret Santa is!

Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas! 🎄