Because of the points you mentioned, I've been wondering why I haven't been able to find a framework-independent, open-source user management and authentication system. This seems like the sort of thing that should be solved in a standard way and not reinvented by every framework (or worse, application) that needs user management.

I've come across some paid services (e.g., stormpath, auth0) that seem to do what I'm talking about. It would be really nice if there were a free project along those lines though.

The API gateway approach has a lot of the upsides you mention:

1. http://microservices.io/patterns/apigateway.html 2. https://getkong.org/ (a few auth plugins) 3. https://github.com/auth0/nginx-jwt / https://www.stavros.io/posts/writing-an-nginx-authentication...

I have yet to use this for anything, so I can't vouch for it's quality, but it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.

http://www.keycloak.org/

Website blurb:

Add authentication to applications and secure services with minimum fuss. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. It's all available out of the box.

You'll even get advanced features such as User Federation, Identity Brokering and Social Login.

I don't think I understood your question, but this might be helpful for people having issues in similar keyword spaces: https://github.com/iNeedThis/phoenix-starter

I use Coherence. It tries to be similar to Devise (of Rails fame).

Do you test your controllers? I'm trying to find some good documentation on how to do that but get warnings to use `build_conn` instead of `conn` when using the example here: https://github.com/smpallen99/coherence/wiki/Testing-with-Co...

If you're getting that in a test, my guess is that you're not passing a context argument with `conn` in it to your test function (e.g. `test "foo", %{conn: conn} do`.

There's a deprecated `conn/0` function that you'll accidentally call instead if you forget to do this.

I don't generate my own controllers when installing Coherence. I just use the ones that come "out of the box."

`conn` is the old version, newer versions of Phoenix use `build_conn`. Just use that

I can attest that using Guardian is probably the best way to go so far with Phoenix. It worked great.

Guardian is the most used. You can use Canary for authorization.