Yes, it's a pain and particularly the user authentication solutions are very complex. The best I have found is this example but it's 100% not a starting point as the first thing you'll have to do is rename everything!
This is why I don't see the point of moving over to Elixir. Rails has ready-to-go and battle tested "modules" that you can pop in and go.
If I used Elixir now, I would have to wait for the community to build something battle tested or I can home-roll my own Elixir authentication. The Poster above just said, "It's a pain particularly user authentication."
I maintain that a web framework is probably one of the least interesting things that's enabled by a language like Elixir, a VM like BEAM, and a foundation like OTP... but... for whatever reason web frameworks have become the criteria by which we seem to measure languages these days.
That said. A chat application is really, really well-suited to Elixir.
It's definitely a lot harder to move to Elixir and Phoenix but I've enjoyed learning FP and Elixir a lot; I've done it mostly to challenge myself and it's informed my programming in other languages.
Really? The user authentication in the book Programming Elixir was pretty simple and straight forward—is that not "production ready"? Authorization seems like a simple plug away.
I find this thread a little confusing. That sample application is using Ueberauth (https://github.com/ueberauth) which appears to be a rich plugin-based authentication framework with many preexisting plugins. You don't run the sample application, you use the framework.
The point is it's not fantastically quick to drop in, in the example app look at the UserFromAuth helper - it's definitely not simple and contains a load of gotchas I'd struggle to deal with from the ueberauth documentation.
The grand parent was asking about a template/hackable starter kit with batteries included. That setup of ueberauth is the best I've found sadly.
https://github.com/hassox/phoenix_guardian