Secret Santa w/ Ruby
For our office secret santa pool, I wrote a quick little ruby script to generate the pairings and email each of the people in our office with their result.
Here’s the salient code:
pool = ["person1@email.address.com",
"person2@email.address.com",
"person3@email.address.com"]
avail = pool.dup
pairs = []
pool.each do |secret_santa|
loop do
index = (rand * avail.length).to_i
recipient = avail[index]
unless recipient == secret_santa
avail.delete_at(index)
pairs << [secret_santa, recipient]
break
end
end
end
This generates a list of tuples (the variable pairs) that you can then iterate over, emailing out the results. Here's the full code (download here).
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'net/smtp'
PRINT_RESULTS = true # Print results to screen?
EMAIL_RESULTS = false # email the results?
pool = ["person1@email.address.com",
"person2@email.address.com",
"person3@email.address.com"]
avail = pool.dup
pairs = []
pool.each do |secret_santa|
loop do
index = (rand * avail.length).to_i
recipient = avail[index]
unless recipient == secret_santa
avail.delete_at(index)
pairs << [secret_santa, recipient]
break
end
end
end
pairs.each do |secret_santa,recipient|
from = "the_north_pole@northpole.np"
from_alias = "santa"
to = secret_santa
to_alias = secret_santa
sbj = "secret santa -- ho ho ho"
msg = "You are #{secret_santa}. " <<
"Your secret santa recipient is: "<<
"#{recipient}."
send_email(from, from_alias, to, to_alias, sbj, msg) if EMAIL_RESULTS
puts "#{secret_santa} => #{recipient}" if PRINT_RESULTS
end
def send_email(from, from_alias, to, to_alias, subject, message)
msg = <
To: #{to_alias} <#{to}>
Subject: #{subject}
#{message}
END_OF_MESSAGE
Net::SMTP.start('localhost') do |smtp|
smtp.send_message msg, from, to
end
end
