Build Your Personal Website in Minutes with Raminy.dev's Docker Image

Raminy.dev is now publicly available, allowing you to create your personal website quickly and easily. Follow these steps to get started:

Create a Notion account if you don’t have one.
Set up a Notion integration for your website.
Initialise your website using the magic tool from Raminy.dev.
Associate your Notion integration with the databases created by the magic tool.
Create an integration on Notion.
Sign up for a Railway account and choose the most basic plan.
Deploy Raminy.dev’s Docker image on your Railway account.
Optional: Associate your personal domain with the Railway deployment.

Create a Notion account

If you don’t have a Notion account, open a browser and navigate to https://www.notion.so/signup. Create your account using one of the available options.

Create a Notion integration for your website

Sign into your Notion account and go to Notion Integrations. Click on the New Integration button. You will see the screen shown in the image below:

Choose a name for your integration in the Add integration name input. Then select a workspace from the Associated workspace drop-down menu. Ensure the selected option for Type is Internal. You can upload a logo if you like and then save it.

After you click on the Save button, Notion will provide you with a secret. You will need this secret later on, which we will refer to as the Notion API Secret.

Initialise your website

To run the website, you will need to create two databases on Notion. You can do this using a magic tool from raminy.dev.

Navigate to https://www.raminy.dev/notion-integration/initialize-website and click on the LOGIN WITH NOTION button. Grant access to only one page. The tool will create two databases under a page named:

My website - [current date]: This page is a database that will contain the pages of your website.
My website - [current date] (people): This page is another database that contains information about you. As of today (22 July 2024), this database only needs to have one record.

You now need to save the page IDs for use in the next steps.

In your Notion account, click on the newly created database that will contain your pages, then copy the ID. An example of it is highlighted in the image below. We will refer to this as the Notion Database ID, which you will need in the next steps.

Then click on the newly created database with a (people) suffix. It is an empty table or list (you can choose your preferred view).

You should add only one item to the table or list. After creating a new item, hold ctrl or command on Mac OS and click on the open button to open the page in a new tab.

Then copy the ID. An example is highlighted in the image below. We call this the Notion My Page ID, and you will need it in the next steps.

Important: Each page in your database contains a Published checkbox. The page will be shown on your website only if this checkbox is ticked. Additionally, the description you write at the top of your database will be displayed on your website’s homepage as your summary.

To add a new article to your website, you just need to add a new entry in the database and them open link and start writing with Notion’s editor.

Associate your Notion integration with the created databases

Go to each of the two databases created in your Notion account. Click on the three dots at the top right corner of the page. Then, from the menu, under Connect to, select the integration you created earlier. My integration name is Raminy.dev, but you may have chosen a different name for yours.

Repeat this process for both databases created by the magic tool.

Create a Railway account

Before we begin, I just want to mention that you don’t have to deploy to Railway. There are, of course, multiple options like Vercel, Render, Fly.io, Heroku, Google Cloud, AWS, and many more. I've reviewed these options, and based on my review, one or more of the following may be true about them:

They don’t support Docker image deployment.
They are quite complex for a non-technical person to deploy.
They lack a proper free tier, or their paid plans are not very affordable.

By the way, if you decide to go with Railway, you can use my referral code ejaSGz or my referral link https://railway.app?referralCode=ejaSGz to sign up.

Let’s continue!

If you don’t have a Railway account, navigate to https://railway.app and sign up, choosing the most basic plan.

Railway isn’t free, but its basic plan is affordable and likely sufficient for hosting a website.

Disclaimer: Creating a Railway account is your own responsibility, and raminy.dev is not liable for any potential costs.

Deploy the Docker image on Railway

After creating your account, go to the dashboard and click on the New Project button. In the input field, type “empty” and select the Empty project option.

On the next screen, click on Add a Service and then select Docker Image.

Paste raminyavari/personal-website:latest into the input field and press Enter or Return on Mac OS.

After completing this step, you will see something like this on the screen. Railway assigns a random name to your service; in this example, it is prolific-emotion, but it will be different for you.

You will need this name for the next steps when setting environment variables. We’ll refer to it as the Service Name.

Now, you need to add a list of environment variables. Click on the service, then go to the Variables tab and select RAW Editor. You can also add them one by one by clicking on the New Variable button, but it's easier to paste all of them at once in the RAW Editor.

In the RAW Editor, stay on the ENV tab, paste the code below into the editor, and replace the values with your own. I’ll explain where to find each value.

Copy and paste the values below, then follow the instructions to edit them.

FULL_NAME=YOUR_FULL_NAME
META_TAGS=YOUR_META_TAGS_FOR_SEO
APP_TITLE=YOUR_APP_TITLE
BASE_URL=https://domain.com
NOTION_API_SECRET=YOUR_NOTION_API_SECRET
NOTION_DATABASE_ID=YOUR_NOTION_DATABASE_ID
NOTION_MY_PAGE_ID=YOUR_NOTION_MY_PAGE_ID
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=YOUR_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID

FULL_NAME: Replace YOUR_FULL_NAME with your name.

META_TAGS: This is crucial for your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO). Replace YOUR_META_TAGS_FOR_SEO with a comma-separated list of values with no spaces.

e.g. software-development,engineering,personal-website

APP_TITLE: Replace YOUR_APP_TITLE with the title of your website. This can simply be your name.

BASE_URL: You have two options here: use the URL assigned by Railway to your app or use your own domain.

If you choose Railway’s URL, your base URL will be https://SERVICE_NAME-production.up.railway.app. Replace SERVICE_NAME with the Service Name you obtained in previous steps.

If you prefer to use your own domain, enter your domain here. You’ll need to configure the service to use your domain later.

NOTION_API_SECRET: Replace YOUR_NOTION_API_SECRET with the Notion API Secret you received when you created your Notion integration.

NOTION_DATABASE_ID: Replace YOUR_NOTION_DATABASE_ID with the Notion Database ID you obtained after using the magic tool to initialise your website.

NOTION_MY_PAGE_ID: Replace YOUR_NOTION_MY_PAGE_ID with the Notion My Page ID you received after using the magic tool to initialise your website.

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID: If you want to setup Google Analytics on your website and you already have an ID, replace YOUR_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID with your ID.

Now, everything is ready to deploy the service. Click the Deploy button you see on the screen.

The deployment will take a few minutes to complete. Once it’s finished, you’ll see a message indicating Deployment Successful with a green tick.

To enable web browsing, go to the Settings tab, and under Networking, activate your Public Network. If you want to use your own domain, you can configure it here.

Upgrade to Newer Versions

You can always find a list of available versions here. If you have followed the instructions, you have already installed the latest version, and the :latest suffix at the end of the Docker image URL points to the latest version.

To upgrade to the latest version, simply go to the service on Railway and redeploy it. This action will fetch the latest version from Docker Hub.

Important: Changes to Environment Variables will not take effect until you redeploy the service.

Sitemap

You can access your sitemap at your-domain/sitemap/0.xml. Add this sitemap to Google Search Console to help index your website.

Well done!

Your website is now ready to browse.

Let’s stay in touch on LinkedIn. Feel free to share any suggestions for improving the website.

Manually Update the Database Properties in Notion

To stay up-to-date with the latest version of the Docker image, please always check this section before deploying a new version. This ensures your databases in Notion are synchronised with the new version.

As of 01 August 2024, the databases on Notion should have the following properties. Please note that Property Names are Case-Sensitive.

Disclaimer: Page and Article refer to the same thing and may be used interchangeably.

Pages Database

The properties are:

Name (type Title): The title of your page or article.
AI_Summary (type Text): The summary of your page or article. You can generate it using AI in Notion.
Published (type Checkbox): The article will be displayed on your website only if this checkbox is ticked.
Created (type Created time): This is a read-only property. Notion sets the value once the page is created.
Tags (type Multi-select): Tags are labels on each article and have their own page on your website. They are used to categorise your content.
CoverTitle (type Text): Caption for your cover photo. You can choose or upload a cover for your article. It is optional, but if you choose one, the caption will be displayed on the cover photo.
Each page also has an optional Icon. You can select an emoji or upload an image. This is not a property; every Notion page has it.

People Database