The one-origin server

laxative serve/dev boots septic's Express app — which already mounts /api/* and /uploads — and serves the poops-built site behind it. Same host, same port:

GET  /                → dist/index.html      (poops output)
GET  /api/messages    → septic REST          (JSON or, for HTMX, HTML)
POST /api/messages    → the generated form's target
GET  /uploads/…       → septic media

Because it's one origin, a generated form can POST /api/messages with no CORS, no proxy, no second server. Unmatched routes fall through to the static site.

// what laxative does, in essence
const { app } = createServer(config.septic)   // septic: /api + /uploads
app.use(express.static(config.outDir))         // poops output behind it
app.listen(port)

A frontend-only project (no septic block) is served as plain static — laxative still runs, it just has no API to mount.

Order matters and is not arbitrary: septic's routes mount first, the static site behind them. septic claims /api/<resource> for each resource you declared, plus /api/_auth, /api/_health and the media URL — and only those. /api/nothing-declared is not an error from the backend; it falls through to the static site like any other unmatched path, and you get its 404.

What dev watches

laxative dev builds once, starts the server, then watches markup.in recursively and runs the whole build again 300 ms after the last change — poops is fast enough that a partial rebuild would be complexity for nothing.

Three things follow, and the first one surprises people:

• No live reload. The browser is never told; refresh to see the change.
• Only markup.in is watched. Editing poops.json, or writing rows through the API, changes nothing on disk that the watcher sees — restart dev (or re-run laxative build) to pick those up.
• A failed rebuild is logged, not fatal. The server keeps serving the last good dist/.

If poops isn't installed, build still emits septic's markup and forms and says so — poops is an optional peer, and laxative degrades to the half it can still do.

The whole loop

Define a resource once → septic makes the table + API + form partial, poops renders the page that includes it, laxative serves both together. That's "one config → full-stack MVP" made real.