The ecosystem has been quite mature for a while. The language reached v1.0 almost 6 years ago and Phoenix v1.0 was released almost 5 years ago. The community has built a lot on top of them since then.

The deployment topic is wide, so the answer will depend on your favorite ways to deploy. If you are using Heroku or another PaaS, it has been very straight-forward since ever. If you want to ship a self-contained executable or a Docker image, the language has standardized on the tooling for assembling those in the last year or so (they are called releases). It was always possible before, just not standardized at the language level.

It runs its own http server but you can easily put it behind nginx, websockets included, by using the reverse-proxy settings. Here is an example article: https://dennisreimann.de/articles/phoenix-nginx-config.html

I’m a long time Python dev converted to Elixir (for ~3 years now, mainly web dev and data pipelines).

The tooling and developer experience in Elixir is first class and the ecosystem is highly mature.

Coming from Python as well I'm really impressed with the tooling. `mix new` is just amazing.

I would say it is quite mature. The ecosystem is a bit smaller and younger, so sometimes you'll find an insufficient library somewhere or no library at all. But I've never had a show-stopper in that regard.

I've done plenty of Django and Flask and I'd rather work with Phoenix. I still like Django plenty but only time I'd pick it is if I think the admin might save me copious time or if there is something else tying the project to Python, such as machine learning.

I run a Crypto arbitrage service www.coinvana.in built with phoenix and deployment consisting of digital ocean, nginx, ssl, mix releases, github actions among other things. At this moment, I just git push my updates to github and all pieces of deployment are taken care of.

Wouldn't you typically run Nginx (or something similar) as a reverse proxy anyways in production?

correct. I was just wondering if it also has inbuilt http server as well to process things like static files etc or is that completely on 3rd party tools like nginx (which I love btw). Kinda like in Golang where you could technically use the static file server but I always use nginx for those things.

Cowboy is Elixir's built-in HTTP server. You can configure things like Nginx or Haproxy as you would with most other frameworks.

Cowboy is not made in Elixir and it's not built-in. It's an HTTP server made in Erlang (which Elixir can call at no runtime cost): https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy

It's more an Erlang http server used by Phoenix ;)