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Google and Microsoft Contacts with Ruby

Learn how to manage Google and Microsoft contacts with the Nylas Ruby SDK. Build your contacts book integration in 15 minutes.

Ruby Contacts Create

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Ruby is ranked among the top ten programming languages in terms of growth and popularity worldwide. The Nylas Contacts API makes it very easy to create and modify contacts for your user’s Google and Microsoft accounts.

This guide explains how to use the Nylas Ruby SDK and Contacts API to create Google and Microsoft (Exchange, Outlook, Office365) contacts and modify their attributes. It covers the following steps:

  1. Set up your Nylas developer account and get your API keys
  2. Install the Nylas Ruby SDK
  3. Manage Google & Microsoft contacts
  4. Explore the Nylas Contacts API

Prerequisites

Before you can start using the Nylas Python SDK, make sure you have done the following:

  • Sign up for your developer account.

  • Get your Nylas keys:

    • CLIENT_ID - The CLIENT ID found on the dashboard page for your Nylas App.
    • CLIENT_SECRET - The CLIENT SECRET found on the dashboard page for your Nylas App.
    • ACCESS_TOKEN - The access token provided when you authenticate an account to your Nylas App.

  • Ensure that gem installed on your development environment.

Install the Nylas Ruby SDK

Run either gem install nylas in your terminal.

Congratulations!

You’re now ready to write code with the Nylas Ruby SDK.

Configure the API Client

At its core, the Nylas Communication Platform is an API client that interfaces with all major email providers. You'll first need to require the nylas package. Create a new instance of this class and pass in the variables you gathered when you received your developer API keys. In the example shown below, replace CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, and ACCESS_TOKEN with your values.

nylas = Nylas::API.new(
    app_id: "CLIENT_ID",
    app_secret: "CLIENT_SECRET",
    access_token: "ACCESS_TOKEN"
)

Be Careful with Secrets
Make sure to follow best practices when including authentication secrets like this in your code. Increase security by storing these values as environment variables and accessing them with the dotenv gem.

List Contacts

The next example demonstrates how to display the first and last name, email address, and ID for the first 10 contacts returned from an account. The first step is to get a list of contact objects. The following example uses the nylas object to return the first 10 contacts from the user account.

contacts = nylas.contacts.limit(10)

Next, we’ll iterate through the list of contact objects and return their first and last name, the first email address stored for the contact, and the contact id, which can be used to make modifications to the contact.

contacts.each{|contact|
  puts "Name: #{contact.given_name} #{contact.surname} | Email: #{contact.emails[0].email} | ID: #{contact.id}"
}

This example uses contact.given_name and contact.surname to construct the contact’s full name. Take a look at the API reference for the contacts endpoint to learn more about the attributes the contact object contains.

Here is the entire code example to list contacts for a user account.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'dotenv/load'
require 'nylas'

nylas = Nylas::API.new(
    app_id: ENV["CLIENT_ID"],
    app_secret: ENV["CLIENT_SECRET"],
    access_token: ENV["ACCESS_TOKEN"]
)

contacts = nylas.contacts.limit(10)
contacts.each{|contact|
  puts "Name: #{contact.given_name} #{contact.surname} | Email: #{contact.emails[0].email} | ID: #{contact.id}"
}

Create a Contact

To create a contact, use nylas to create a new contact object:

contact = nylas.contacts.create

Now it’s time to define some attributes for this new contact:

contact.given_name = "My"
contact.middle_name = "Nylas"
contact.surname = "Friend"
contact.emails['work'] = ['[email protected]']
contact.notes = "Make sure to keep in touch!"
contact.phone_numbers['business'] = ['(555) 555-5555']
contact.web_pages['homepage'] = ["https://nylas.com"]

There is quite a bit happening here, so let’s break it all down.

  • contact.given_name, contact.middle_name, and contact.surname define the first, middle, and last name for the contact.
  • contact.emails adds an email address to the contact and sets the type to work. You can also specify personal as a type.
  • Similarly, contact.phone_numbers attaches a phone number to the contact using the type business; Google and Microsoft label this as the contact’s work phone number. This label must be one of business, organization_main, mobile, assistant, business_fax, home_fax, radio, car, home, or pager.
  • Finally, contact.web_pages connects a website URL to the contact with the label homepage. This label must be one of homepage, profile, work, or blog.

Take a look a the API reference for the contact creation endpoint to learn more about the attributes you can assign to a contact object.

The very last thing you need to do is call .save() on the contact object. This saves the contact to Nylas, which then syncs the new contact to the third party provider.

contact.save

Once the contact has been saved and synced to Google, you should see a contact that looks something like this:

Google Contact Example

Here is an example of the same contact in Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft Contact Example

Here is the full example for creating a contact.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'dotenv/load'
require 'nylas'

nylas = Nylas::API.new(
    app_id: ENV["CLIENT_ID"],
    app_secret: ENV["CLIENT_SECRET"],
    access_token: ENV["ACCESS_TOKEN"]
)

contact = nylas.contacts.create
# Add a first, middle, and last name for the contact.
contact.given_name = "My"
contact.middle_name = "Nylas"
contact.surname = "Friend"

# Email address 'type' must be either 'work' or 'personal'
contact.emails = [{type: 'work', email: '[email protected]'}]
contact.notes = "Make sure to keep in touch!"

# Phone number type must be one of 'business', 'organization_main',
# 'mobile', 'assistant', 'business_fax', 'home_fax', 'radio', 'car', 'home', or 'pager'
# Google and Microsoft label 'business' phone numbers as the contact's Work phone number
contact.phone_numbers = [{type: 'business', number: '555 555-5555'}]

# Web page type must be one of 'homepage', 'profile', 'work', or 'blog'
contact.web_pages = [{type: 'homepage', url: 'https://nylas.com'}]

contact.save
puts contact.to_json

Delete a Contact

To delete a contact, you need to get the id of the contact and pass it as an argument to the contacts.find().destroy function. In the following example, replace CONTACT_ID with the ID of the contact you want to delete.

You're about to delete a contact!
The next commands will delete the specified! Make sure you want to do this before proceeding.

nylas.contacts.find('{CONTACT_ID}').destroy

Here is the entire code example to delete a contact.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'dotenv/load'
require 'nylas'

nylas = Nylas::API.new(
    app_id: ENV["CLIENT_ID"],
    app_secret: ENV["CLIENT_SECRET"],
    access_token: ENV["ACCESS_TOKEN"]
)

# WARNING: before running this script,
# ensure you want to delete the contact with this designated ID
nylas.contacts.find('{CONTACT_ID}').destroy

Explore the Nylas Contacts API

If you’ve made it this far, congrats, you’ve successfully learned how to manage Google and Microsoft contacts with the Nylas Contacts API! There is plenty more that you can do with it: take a look at the following resources to learn more about the Nylas Communications Platform capabilities.