What do you mean by `mix phx.new` taking charge? $ mix new elixir_umbrella --umbrella $ cd elixir_umbrella/apps $ mix phx.new elixir_umbrella_web

What do you mean by `mix phx.new` taking charge? $ mix new elixir_umbrella --umbrella $ cd elixir_umbrella/apps $ mix phx.new elixir_umbrella_web This should work just fine and it means that this phoenix application is a sub-application in your umbrella project. Likely you'd do a `mix new elixir_umbrella_cool_service` to handle DB and service stuff that is more about business logic. I can sort of see what you mean by Phoenix doing magic, because a lot of what you see on the surface looks like magic, but it's hard to really discuss these things when one can't pinpoint what the actual issue is. On the idea of rails developers having an easy time, I don't really think it's that big a part of the concept, to be honest. A rails dev expecting rails is going to drown in BEAM/OTP things anyway provided he isn't making the same postgres + web-server applications without any real value from the BEAM, so I don't think the idea is to really cater to that kind of thing anyway. I'm not a rails dev, so I can't really say what their feeling is.