Thanks for the input Ray, much appreciated. Yesterday I indeed got export-import to work. However it feels a bit clunky. Coming from a Python background I would like to see Studio just modify some sort of configuration file. And the configuration file is tracked in the repo. Upon push, Odoo would use the configuration file in the build.

OK in addition to this post I contacted Odoo Support and they referred to multiple of your sources, great. The lady in customer support mentioned that the best practice is to make this database schema changes and settings changes still manually in the production environment. I guess that's fine for now. It bothers me that I cannot get the database in a state using a script, the same way a dockerfile works for a container. Anyway, maybe Odoo could consider adding these best practices to the documentation.

Modules can run code the first time they are installed. You can see how we do this by reviewing the source code of the base module at https://github.com/odoo/odoo/blob/19.0/odoo/addons/base/__init__.py

A good primer is at https://www.netilligence.io/blog/what-are-the-different-types-of-hooks-in-odoo-18/

post_init_hook(cr): This hook runs after the module is installed or upgraded, specifically after the database structure changes are applied. This is the hook used to run logic (like data migration or cleanup) every time a module is upgraded or freshly installed.

very helpful, thanks. I got PGAdmin to work on a local docker instance of Odoo to better understand the database model. very insightful to understand Odoo's inner workings. For now I will keep things simple and just use a bunch of backups, rebuilds etc.

Just be aware up to 30% of the data in any given Odoo database is not persisted in PostgreSQL (calculated/computed fields). Look for Fields in the Odoo Fields Menu (Developer Mode) that are not stored.