[jerelunruh]

Another Django -> Phoenix dev here. Currently I miss Django's model field types (UrlField, EmailField, etc) and will probably write them if no one else does soon. I sometimes miss South style migrations when I'm prototyping but doubt there's a good reason to implement them in Phoenix. For building JSON APIs JA Serializer is a quite capable alternative to DRF-JA.

For the Django Admin there's ex_admin which I haven't used yet but it appears to take a bit more work than the Django Admin does.

I haven't felt like virtualenv + pip was too bad for deps and deployment but exrm is already comparable/easier with an even better `mix release` planned for this summer/fall. No uwsgi or gunicorn to configure and even nginx can be skipped.

For the last part of your question: the biggest thing missing from Django was a good way to do websockets. Django has channels now but I doubt they'll work like Phoenix/OTP/Erlang (especially in the concurrency and fault tolerance categories).

[cwisecarver]

Is it common to skip nginx or insert-your-reverse-proxy-of-choice-here?

I'm working on a Phoenix app, getting close to being ready for a beta deployment, and I was just looking for best practices as far as putting it in production.

[jerelunruh]

From what I've read (I'm not an expert either) nginx is completely optional. Cowboy (used by Phoenix) supports https termination and I understand that it's the router for Heroku so it sees plenty of traffic.