Use Phoenix for a simple API server?

Phoenix is primarily a set of plugs (and optionally a nice websocket handler) on top of cowboy, it can be as slim as you want it to be, and as such you should use it, just remove what you don’t need from your endpoint if you so wish, and you can grow it later if you need.

Thanks for the super fast reply.
It’s just when using ruby I found out that Sinatra was the best fit for this kind of servers, Rails just requires way too much fuss to make such simple severs.
Guess I’m still thinking ruby.

Yeah, Phoenix is not at all heavy, it is rather very lightweight, especially as you can pretty trivially pick and choose what of it you want to use. The default generated endpoint is showing off a lot of common features (not even all) and those you do not need to leave in if you don’t need them. Like if you don’t need static file hosting then remove that plug call, or if you don’t need a router then remove that call (finish up with a final single plug or so). Etc… etc… You can pick and choose and mix and match what you want.

You haven’t seen nothing yet

According to legendary people like Dave Thomas (i.e PragDave) Phoenix is much more than a web framework

I know I’ve said this a million times on the forum now, but I highly recommend his Elixir course - it blew my mind, and is one of the best courses I have ever done

(In case anyone is wondering, no I am not on commission!! Wish I was though, I reckon I could sell his course all day long no sweat )

Hear hear! It is a whole way of Structuring the program, it is well worth following.

Yup! It gets even more mind-bending when you factor that you can use more than one Phoenix layer in your app - can anyone imagine using more than one Rails ‘app’ in their apps? Nope, neither can I

I’ll take your word and go through it before starting the work on the server, hopefully I won’t have to start with ruby and Sinatra and do a move later, time frame is going to be really short for this project.

Nice

I would recommend reading Programming Elixir first if you haven’t, though depending on your experience you may not need to (I would anyway though as it’s an excellent book, as it’s Elixir in Action).

Let us know how you get on

If time frame is super short then use what you know. ^.^;

If you want to learn something new, Elixir and Phoenix will get you going with something fast that will run very well though.

Well this is going to be my first experience with Elixir but I’m not afraid to try new stuff.
Already did a move from Perl to Ruby without previous experience with Ruby on a production server.
The main decision maker would be how much time I’ll have for this server, Ruby + Sinatra would require a day or so Elixir most probably a week or so.
First iteration of this server wouldn’t need to be prefect it would just need to work and be secure. In the future it would need to be fast, but that’s a problem for the future;)
So the decision would be time, I do know and expect that in the second stage of this project it would need to be lighting fast Elixir is the perfect fit, and I want to have my first experience with Elixir when I can make mistakes and don’t have to worried about benchmarks.