Secret Santa

The secret-santa package is a Secret Santa 🎅🎄 game which randomly assigns and notifies people to whom they should give a gift using Twilio's messaging API.

Why?

My friends and I wanted to have a Secret Santa party in our group, but didn't have the time to meet and draw names, so we wrote this code to have it draw the names and send each participant the name of whom he should give a gift to.

But WHY is it over-engineered?

I was bored. Truly bored!
And I know this could be written in one file - with a handful of code lines, but I wanted to try a few things out such as poetry, mkdocs, Google style docstrings, etc.
=> This is the result.

Usage

Prerequisites

To be able to install the project's dependencies, you need to have:

• Python (>= 3.12.0)
• Poetry (>= 1.8.0)
• Twilio account with an active phone number

A few notes:

• This package has not been tested with older version of python, but one of the things that would probably break in older version is the use of | (for Union type hinting) without importing it from futures.
• This package is using poetry as its build system, but that could be changed to pip by changing the [build-system] section to requires = ["setuptools ~= 58.0", "cython ~= 0.29.0"] and running the command below from the root of the project:

  python -m pip install .

  • Source: pyproject.toml page at pip's documentation
• This code uses an alphanumeric sender ID, i.e. showing the sender as SecretSanta, but this isn't supported in every country (please check Twilio 's Alphanumeric Sender ID for Twilio Programmable SMS before running the code with your configurations.)

Configs and Environment Needed

To run this package, you need to have:

• The Twilio environment variables set / added to a .env file to be passed to the program through the command line with the --env-path arguments.
  • The environment variables needed are: TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN, and TWILIO_NUMBER which could be added to a .env file like this:

    TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID="YOUR_TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID_HERE"
    TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN="YOUR_TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN_HERE"
    TWILIO_NUMBER="YOUR_TWILIO_NUMBER_HERE"

  • In case the --env-path argument was not provided, the code will try to search for a .env file at the project root. Please note: The code will not throw an error if no environment file has been passed / if the file does not exist, but it will validate the existence of the three environment variables mentioned above (i.e. the environment variables needed could be set from the commandline / on the system beforehand.)
• A list of the participants in a JSON format file, to be passed to the program using the --participants-path argument, with each player having a full_name, phone_number, and optionally a nickname as such:

  [
  {
    "full_name": "Name 1",
    "phone_number": "+123456789",
    "nickname": "N1"
  },
  {
    "full_name": "Name 2",
    "phone_number": "+987654321"
  },
  ...
  ]

  • In case the --participants-path argument was not provided, the code will try to look for a participants.json file at the project root.
  • The file needs to have at least three participants.
  • The code will NOT check for same numbers. (this may be added later)
  • The code will determine two players' data the same if they have their three fields are the same.

Installing the Dependencies

To install the dependencies with poetry installed, all you need to do is run:

poetry install

Running

To run the Secret Santa package / module, all you need to do after setting it up is run:

poetry run secret_santa

with the appropriate commands / arguments.

To see all the supported command-line arguments, run poetry run secret_santa --help.

Future Plans

I can think of some things to add, such as:

• Additional command-line arguments, including but not limited to:
  • --check-participants to validate no two participants are the same (by phone number)
  • --custom-message to allow for customizing the message to be sent to the user's liking.
• Wait for some time, check the message status if it was still queued, and resend it in case it failed to send / wasn't delivered.
• Allow for more messaging methods other than Twilio (including but not limited to: Email messaging, another SMS service, etc.)
• Add unit / functional testing. Done :)

If ever comes a time in which I'll be in a similar state to the one I was in writing this code, I may add these, but I don't see myself doing a lot with this package in the near future, however, if you like it and would like to add something, feel free to contribute.

Contributing

You could contribute code to the repository in many ways:

1. Bug Reports: If you encounter a bug running the code, feel free to submit an issue.
2. Bug Fixes: If there's a bug you encountered and would like to fix, or saw an issue you could fix, you're more than welcome fix it.
3. Feature Code: If there's a feature that is , and you would like to code, you're also welcome.
   • In case you want to add a new feature, it would be advisable to raise the feature in an issue to be discussed beforehand.
4. Optimization: If you see an opportunity to improve the code and decide to code it, I want to thank you for making the code better.

So... How can I contribute?

1. Fork it.
2. Create your feature branch, running the command git checkout -b my-new-feature.
3. Make sure the tests pass as expected, and add some tests covering your changes.
4. Document all functions and methods by the Google style docstrings
5. Commit your changes, git commit -m "Added some feature".
6. Push to the branch git push origin my-new-feature.
7. Create a new Pull Request, merging from your my-new-feature to the main branch with a descriptive description of the changes made.

License

In the spirit of Christmas, I decided publish this code under the Unlicense License, to whomever may find it useful / want to use it (if someone ever will 😊.)

Who

The secret-santa project was originally developed by Fawzi Abo Shkara.