You can pass options like --no-ecto, --no-brunch, --no-html to mix phx.new in order to leave out parts of Phoenix you don’t need. What exactly is not lightweight enough for you about Phoenix?

Phoenix is already a lightweight framework

We do have other frameworks in Elixir, but I would say that generally they exist to offer different styles of development.

Also, in case you didn’t know, Phoenix has been described as ‘more than just a web framework’ in the sense that it can be used as a thin layer inside an Elixir app… multiple times

If that interests you, the legendary Dave Thomas goes into detail about it in his online course.

I would love to hear examples about this in regards to Phoenix. I.e. something you wanted to take into a different direction and it is getting in your way.

The only one on top of my mind is getting connection parameters in your sockets, but that is being fixed for v1.4.

This might be of interest to you if you want to build something using Plug. German Velasco is a great guy, I used to work with him at thoughtbot, and he breaks it down very nicely:

Build your very own Web Framework in Elixir

I’ve built myself a “lightweight web framework” with plug+cowboy for Nerves devices pretty frequently for things like configuration utilities. Once you build in ecto and templating, you’ve essentially got yourself what you get from mix phx.new --no-ecto --no-brunch but it doesn’t have the same level of maturity/usability as the phx.new version.

That being said it isn’t particularly hard, and it can be kept to about one/two + templates which is nice.