It’s a Ruby script that checks your Gmail account for the Cha-ching emails that Bandcamp sends you every time you sell something. Whenever it finds a sale, it grabs a download code from a .csv file, feeds it into an email template and sends it to the buyer.
We decided to give away a “bonus disc” with our Not Kings album. It’s set up as a private album on Bandcamp, and every time someone buys the album we have to email out a download code for the bonus tracks to the buyer.
That got old pretty quickly, so I wrote this script to automate the process. It’s nice because it uses my Gmail account – the outgoing emails end up in my Sent folder, so I can easily check and make sure it’s working well. I also set it up to email me a report each time it sends an email because I’m paranoid about creating a script that accidentally spams all our fans with thousands of messages.
I run this on my shared server using a simple crontab entry to run it every hour, but it will work equally well on a Mac and you can run it manually – it will still save you the hassle of having to find a download code and write an email every time someone buys something. You’ll just need a working version of Ruby (your Mac should have that already).
To get started, download the repository. Create a set of download codes on Bandcamp, export them and put the .csv file in the folder with the script. Create a copy of config-sample.yml and name it config.yml. Then open up your new config file and change the bits that need changing. The comments should explain what’s needed, including how to filter cha-ching emails for a particular release into a Gmail folder for the script to check.
You’ll also want to edit the email template to say something that’s relevant to you and doesn’t include kisses from Ben & Juju.
The default settings send no email, so you can get run the script without worrying. To do that, cd to the directory containing the script, and type ./chaching_checker.rb. You may need to change the permissions on the file to make it executable: chmod 755 chaching_checker.rb.
It will probably tell you that you need to install some Ruby gems, which is true (pretty much the ruby-gmail gem and its dependencies). Follow the instructions.
Let me know how it goes! I’d be interested to know if anyone else finds this as useful as me...