For phoenix projects, inside of Nixpkgs you can either use yarn2nix (mkYarnModule) or node2nix. An example with yarn2nix can be found [here](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/servers/web-apps/plausible/default.nix#L39). An example with node2nix will follow. To package something outside of nixpkgs, you have alternatives like [npmlock2nix](https://github.com/nix-community/npmlock2nix) or [nix-npm-buildpackage](https://github.com/serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage)
For phoenix projects, inside of Nixpkgs you can either use `fetchYarnDeps` or `buildNpmPackage`. An example with `fetchYarnDeps` can be found [here](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/by-name/pl/plausible/package.nix). An example with `fetchYarnDeps` will follow. To package something outside of nixpkgs, you have alternatives like [npmlock2nix](https://github.com/nix-community/npmlock2nix) or [nix-npm-buildpackage](https://github.com/serokell/nix-npm-buildpackage)
Each tool has an abstraction to just build the node_modules (dependencies) directory.
You can always use the `stdenv.mkDerivation` with the node_modules to build the package (symlink the node_modules directory and then use the package build command).
The node_modules abstraction can be also used to build some web framework frontends.
For an example of this see how [plausible](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/by-name/pl/plausible/package.nix) is built.
Then when building the frontend you can just symlink the node_modules directory.