I felt similarly when I first started out with Phoenix. It seems a lot of the earlier elixir libraries are ports from popular ruby libraries, made by developers who just started out with elixir. It’s constantly improving though, and there are some great libraries for what you need.

For background jobs, I really like honeydew. We’re planning to use it in production soon. For user authentication, I’ve written Pow and currently run it in two production apps. For permissions you should build it yourself, it’s super simple with a plug module.

I don’t like to waste too much time with my (tiny) team on things that isn’t essential to our business, so I get where you are coming from. It took some time to switch from rails mindset to phoenix/elixir, but it was definitely worth it for us. Our development is running much smoother now, and after learning the a-z with our first app, it has been an incredibly easy process to build new apps, and we haven’t felt much was lacking in the ecosystem.

There are a few packages that implement job queues over a DB table.

EctoJob is one I maintain that is little more than GenStage producer and ConsumerSupervisor triggered by Postgrex.Notifications.

Elixir makes building these things really simple and fun

The packages I use most often across all my projects are(in no order):

comeonin
httpoison
money
timex
bamboo
distillery
absinthe + related
geo_postgis

For auth if its b2c I’ll reach for uberauth and social logins but generally I prefer just a self rolled auth system using comeonin permissions self rolled too. I never really liked working with stuff like cancan.

Background jobs I just use separate processes or genservers.