Secret Santinator

A small application to match Secret Santa gifters to giftees and secretly inform the gifters by email

What is Secret Santa?

In Secret Santa every participant secretly gets assigned another person. They will then find a small gift for that person. That person must then find out from whom they got the gift.

In my family, we started playing this game every year for Christmas, as it allows to keep the magic of gift-giving alive while reducing the chaos of "everyone needing to find a gift for everyone". To make this possible, I wrote this little application.

What does this thing do?

The key bit of Secret Santa is that the assigning of gifter to giftee is done in secret. This program is meant to act as a neutral party which produces this assignment and then informs the gifters by email.

How do I configure this thing?

You need to write the 3 config files:

• The email_server.yml file includes the settings for sending emails, such as mail server credentials.
• The email_message.yml file includes the contents of the email that will be sent to people.
• The people.yml file includes a list of all participants. Each person consists of a name and an email, and optionally an id, which may be used in the email subject or body.

You can copy the config.sample directory to get started with templates for these files. The config files need to be in a directory prefixed with "config-".

Once the config files are set up, you can run the program and provide the name of your config directory as an argument.

To Do

• Allow generating multi-cycle mappings