todokku / secretsanta

Email-based Gift Exchange Flask Web App

Optimal Secret Santa

Optimal Secret Santa is a simple web application that allows a group of at least 3 people to generate gift exchange assignments via email.

Go to http://bit.ly/optimalsanta and have fun! Or visit Youtube to see it in action!

Features

• No account registration required! Just provide the names and emails of each member
• No spam! We encrypt and store your emails, and will never send you unnecessary emails (unlike some online Secret Santa apps...)
• Automatically emails each person their gift assignment (who to give to)
• Lets each member send a message, such as a wishlist, to the email of their Secret Santa without knowing who they are
• Each member's Secret Santa remains anonymous, you can't use math to guess who your Secret Santa is
• You will never be assigned to yourself
• If A is giving a gift to B, we won't generate a pairing where B is also giving to A

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See Deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

The minimum requirements are python-3.7.5 and pip. The required packages are in requirements.txt.

Installing

Clone the repository to your computer.

git clone https://github.com/benleone90/OptimalSecretSanta.git

Install virtualenv to create a Python virtual environment in this directory.

python -m pip install --user virtualenv
python -m venv venv

(Optional) Update your venv to the latest supported version of python.

python -m venv --upgrade YOUR_VENV_PATH

Activate the virtual environment then install all the requirements.

source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

You will need to edit the environmental variables to the email account you are using. The SECRET_KEY will be used for the unique url token generation. In app.py:

MAIL_USERNAME='[email protected]',
MAIL_PASSWORD='your_password',
SECRET_KEY='your_secret_key',

To run the website locally,

flask run

then navigate to http://localhost:5000/ or wherever the Flask website is running.

Deployment

To deploy this app on Heroku, follow the instructions on how to Deploy A Python Web App on Heroku.

Testing

To test the algorithm locally without deploying the web app, run test.py inside the misc folder.

$ python test.py
Panat (3) -> Ben   (0)
Ben   (0) -> Josh  (1)
Josh  (1) -> Wiley (2)
Wiley (2) -> Ken   (4)
Ken   (4) -> Panat (3)

Built With

• Flask - The web framework used
• SQLAlchemy - Database toolkit
• Heroku - Cloud hosting platform

Authors

• Ben Leone - Front End Development - benleone90
• John Wiley Hunt - Email API - whunt1965
• Josh Goldberg - SQL Database Engineer - jdg555666
• Ken Krebs - Front End Web Design - ken-krebs
• Panat Taranat - Product and UX Design, Back End, Algorithm, Logo Design, Video - ptaranat

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgments

• John Mikulskis
• Miguel Mark
• Doug Densmore