I want to open this thread for you all to discuss and help those who really like Ash but are still hesitant to use it in a real project. I chose Ash for my SaaS that I’m currently developing, but then I decided to abandon it. So here, I’m going to share with you why I made that decision and a little about my opinions about the Ash framework and the Ash ecosystem in general. This post will be a little long, so I ask you to be patient .

First of all, I want to make some things clear: this is NOT a hate or random critique about Ash! @zachdaniel and all the people who keep maintaining the ecosystem around the framework (Ignite, Ash, AshPostgres, and so on) are like magicians to me. This is really huge, and I’ve never seen anything like it in other languages. Also, the support from Zach is almost instantaneous, so congratulations, guys.

Another important note is that I’m not an Ash expert like the guys who maintain it, but I think the most important point of view for people who maintain the framework is normal user feedback, so I guess my opinions are valid in this sense.

Now, focusing on the title, there’s no better slogan than “model your domain, derive the rest” for describing what Ash is. It’s really what you’ve ever dreamed of: all your web application needs solved in one place. You don’t need to decide about which library to use, check if it’s active or secure; you just plug and play with Ash. I thought it was too good to be true when using it for the first time. You get an amazing and fully featured authorization system (which is something that Phoenix doesn’t give you out of the box), you’ve got authentication, email, soft delete, an admin panel—sometimes it feels like Ash is a perfect SaaS template. And all of this comes with a pretty declarative and beautiful API. But if Ash is so good, why did I quit it?

Well, this is the part where I share some caveats about Ash. Again, this isn’t hate or empty criticism; it’s just my opinion, and I’m assuming that some of these things may just be a “skill issue.” So let’s dive a little into the problems I’ve had with Ash.

Testing

Ash gives me the feeling that it’s useless to test my resources and code in general, and I’ve noticed it’s not very clear how my test designs should look. There’s a lot of discussion around here and in the Discord community, and the documentation only goes so far. In fact, the documentation has very simple examples and resources about testing, and it gets worse when it comes to the main extensions such as AshAuthentication.

Example scenario: Let’s suppose that I’ve set up my User resource with magic link only authentication. What’s the proper way of testing this? Should I even test it? I won’t be testing the framework, will I? What about the policy which checks AshAuthenticationInteraction? Is it good practice to disable it for almost every test?

Also, coverage is a useless metric to define code safety/quality with Ash, since things only run at compile time, so your resources will always remain with 0% coverage.

Learning Curve

I won’t focus a lot on this topic because it depends a lot. I found it easy to do things with Ash, but I spent too much time in the documentation or reading source code, mainly from AshAuthentication. It reminded me of when I first encountered the devise gem in the Rails world, and it also reminded me of José Valim talking somewhere (I think it was during the development of phx.gen.auth) that Devise was a mistake because things just got too magical. I felt this a bit with AshAuthentication. I think there’s a lot of work that could be done in the documentation to solve this, but the code is really understandable. About Ash, I think it’s just a matter of time until you get the hang of things, but it’s kind of boring to open the documentation every time you want to do a preparation, change, or calculation. Again, it could be a skill issue on my part.

Keeps you away from Elixir

I’ve seen too many comparisons between Ash and Ecto, but unlike Ecto, Ash is not a library; Ash is your application. Your entire app will literally derive from it. You cannot decouple Ash, and it would be a silly thing to do. So you basically need to agree to do things the “Ash way.” You eventually get used to it, but I confess that it bothers me a bit, and I still don’t know if Ash is really for every kind of project—not for technical reasons, but for the necessity of wrapping your business around something. I feel like if Zach wakes up and is no longer in the mood to maintain Ash or to answer my doubts, my application would be doomed.

With a heavy heart, I’ve decided to follow my reason and remove Ash from my project, but I’m still not 100% sure if the good parts don’t compensate for the bad ones. Maybe this thread will give me another perspective. I would be grateful to have a healthy discussion here with those who are using Ash in production, those who maintain the framework, and those who like it a lot, like me, but are still hesitant to use it.

Thanks again to @zachdaniel and all the community for the great work (including myself, as long as my 2 contributions to Ash count ), and please keep doing the great work on it. This is probably the longest post on the Elixir Forum, so sorry about that, guys, but it was for a good cause