The Coppell North Middle School PTO emails the school announcements to parents who pay to receive them. This Node JS program builds HTML from the announcements saved on to the school's Google Drive.

You'll need NodeJS version >= 14.10. This app is written in Javascript, targeting the NodeJS runtime. I like to be able to quickly switch to different NodeJS versions. So I use nvm to manage my NodeJS versions. I developed this program using version v14.10.0.

This program integrates with Google Drive, requiring a credentials.json files containing account credentials to get access to the specified Google Drive folder. Contact me offline to get this file.

First step is to get all the necessary code by installing all the dependent libraries.

npm i

Second step is to create a file called .env (yes, staring with a dot (.)). The .env file should look like the following:

email=<your gmail email address>
password=<your gmail password>

Third step is to get the credentials.json file (contact me).

Fourth step is to run the program like so in a terminal, command prompt or powershell:

npm start -- --date=10/2/2019 --folder="2020-2021"

The --date is the date to start looking for announcements. The --folder argument is the name of the folder to start searching for the files.

When you run npm start -- --folder="2020-2021" --date=10/2/2019 in your terminal, you'll see a URL if this is the first time and you haven't authenticated with Google yet. Copy and paste that URL into your browser's URL field and hit return. This will direct you to Google. Go ahead and signin and accept. The program will start a web server which will intercept the HTTP redirect from Google's OAuth sequence, capture the code and write it in a file called token.json. Subsequent executions shouldn't require you to enter an authentication code until that Token expires.

The output of the program will be a text file called output.html in the app directory and a scheduled newsletter. Then just login to membership toolkit and release the newsletter.