I'm very new to Drupal, so please don't be too mad in case I have any major misunderstandings :) I've tried searching for a similar problem, but is just couldn't find a suitable solution for my case.
We're currently setting up a Drupal 9 project, which will perspectively have a shared development environment and a production environment as well as a local instance to develop on. I'd wish to have a way to synchronize those instances to have the same configuration, content types and optionally even content.
At the moment, I'm developing a theme locally, which means I have installed a Drupal instance inside a XAMPP server. That theme is versioned by git, so it is migratable to another developer without a problem.
For migrating the structure and content (which is obviously saved in the database), I tried using Backup & Migrate, but there were two issues I was facing: The D9 version is not fully supported yet, so an installation via composer fails with default security settings, and there seems to be an already multiple times reported bug when trying to backup the entire site. You can workaround it by backing up the database and the files separately, but this is pretty inconvenient due to other issues (but let's keep it a little short...).
I also tried to export the whole database, which is actually working (after this little fix), but the overhead seems a little high for me. Especially when I just want to copy new content types from dev to prod environment without users, content and so on, for instance.
So, to finally come to an end, is there any best practice for this case? Or should I even consider to go a whole other way?
Thanks in advance!
I definitely wouldn't recommend using Backup & Migrate for this - that's so Drupal 7! Drupal 9 has better tools that are baked into core!
There are many possible ways to import/export Config and Content entities across environments, but I'll share what I believe to be the current best practices.
For Configuration, Drupal 9 has a built-in Configuration Management system that makes it quite easy to migrate Config across environments. It can be used within the Drupal UI, and also integrates with Drush (a command-line tool for Drupal).
Essentially, the Config system exports all Config settings as standardized YAML files, which can easily be included in your Git repository. This will make it incredibly easy to set up another Drupal environment that is identical in its Config settings.
More info on Configuration Management can be found here.
For Content, Drupal 9 has a built-in Migrate API, which facilitates migrations from any data source into a Drupal 9 environment. That means you could set up a migration that would allow you to migrate your Content entities across environments.
I've only ever used this for migrating Content (migrated from Drupal 7), but I believe it's also possible to use this to migrate Config as well.
If you decide to use the Migrate API, you may (depending on the setup of your content) need to install Migrate Tools and Migrate Plus.
More info on the Migrate API can be found here.