Series Launching 1st May 2026
6 guides taking an AI-generated app from local development to self-hosted production. Docker, CI/CD, private registry, full sovereignty. New articles every 2 days from May 1st.
Want to be notified when the series drops?

Series Launching 1st May 2026
6 guides taking an AI-generated app from local development to self-hosted production. Docker, CI/CD, private registry, full sovereignty. New articles every 2 days from May 1st.
Want to be notified when the series drops?
You’ve used AI to generate an app. Cursor, Copilot, Claude – the code works locally. Now what?
This series bridges the gap between vibe coding and real deployment. We’ll take an AI-generated application through the complete journey: containerization, private registry, CI/CD pipeline, and self-hosted deployment. No cloud vendor lock-in. Full sovereignty.
By the end, you’ll understand the deployment stack that startups and enterprises use – and you’ll own every piece of it.
From the field: Taking a side project from prototype to production is where most developers get stuck. The code works on your laptop, but deploying it properly — containers, CI/CD, monitoring, a real domain — is a different skill set. This series bridges that gap.
Career Context: Developers who can also deploy are worth more. Understanding containers, CI/CD, and infrastructure turns a £45k developer role into a £60k full-stack or DevOps position. This series gives you the deployment skills that AI can’t (yet) replace.
Follow along with a real project. Each article builds on the last, taking our AI-generated app from local development to production deployment.
The AI-assisted development experience. What we’re building, how AI helped, and why “it works locally” isn’t good enough.
Local development environment that mirrors production. Docker Compose for dependencies, environment variables, and reproducible builds.
From code to container. Dockerfile best practices, multi-stage builds, and images that are small, secure, and fast.
Self-hosted registry for your images. No Docker Hub rate limits, full control, and the sovereignty to deploy without external dependencies.
Push code, run tests, deploy automatically. GitHub Actions or Gitea, webhooks, and the automation that makes deployment boring (in a good way).
Production deployment on infrastructure you control. Reverse proxy, SSL, monitoring, and the operational patterns that keep it running.
| Skill | Why It Matters | Enterprise Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Containerization | Consistent environments everywhere | Docker/Podman at every company |
| Private Registry | Own your deployment artifacts | Harbor, Artifactory, ECR |
| CI/CD | Automated quality and deployment | Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions |
| Reverse Proxy | SSL, routing, load balancing | nginx, Traefik, HAProxy |
| Monitoring | Know when things break | Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog |
The sovereignty angle: Every piece of this stack can run on hardware you control. No vendor lock-in, no surprise bills, no “we’re discontinuing this service” emails. Your code, your infrastructure, your rules.
6 practical deployment guides starting 1st May 2026. From vibe coding to production infrastructure you own. No spam, just a heads-up when each article goes live.
If you found this useful, these guides continue the journey:

ReadTheManual is run, written and curated by Eric Lonsdale.
Eric has over 20 years of professional experience in IT infrastructure, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity, but started with PCs long before that.
He built his first machine from parts bought off tables at the local college campus, hoping they worked. He learned on BBC Micros and Atari units in the early 90s, and has built almost every PC he’s used between 1995 and now.
From helpdesk to infrastructure architect, Eric has worked across enterprise datacentres, Azure environments, and security operations. He’s managed teams, trained engineers, and spent two decades solving the problems this site teaches you to solve.
ReadTheManual exists because Eric believes the best way to learn IT is to build things, break things, and actually read the manual. Every guide on this site runs on infrastructure he owns and maintains.