Secret Santa Script

This is a simple Ruby script for assigning secret Santas and emailing everyone their assignment. The basic rule is that nobody can be assigned to give a gift to someone in their own group (including, of course, themselves). In my family, group == household, but it could mean anything you like.

The script uses Dennis Ranke's solution from The Ruby Quiz #2, which gives everyone a correct assignment in a single pass through the list. Nice! :) The only tweaks I made were practical ones, like using config files, and a tiny bit of refactoring, logging, etc, to make it more apparent what's happening.

Usage

• Clone the repo
• Copy each of the .yml.example files in config/ to a corresponding .yml and customize
• Run ruby secret_santa.rb and examine the output
• When you're satisfied, set REALLY_SENDING to true and run it again

Optional Twilio setup and usage

• Fill in your own Twilio credentials in the twilio.yml config file
• Change SENDER_TYPE to :twilio
• Set REALLY_SENDING to false to disable really sending text messages or to true to really send text messages.

!! Depending on your Twilio account settings, sending text messages may costs money.

Dependencies

None, other than Ruby (I tested on 1.9) and the standard library.

If you want to use Twilio as sender type, you need to install the twilio-ruby gem:

gem install twilio-ruby'

Thanks

Thanks to Dennis Ranke for a nice solution, and to James Edward Gray II for running The Ruby Quiz.