@gotwf Thank you for your answer, but I was looking for a way to apply this to my NodeBB forum.
@PitaJ I want to version all of the changes and choices (i.e. adding a plugin, admin panel choices) that I make to the forum in git. Somehow I get the feeling all of them are persisted in the DB 
With a lower priority, I am also looking on how to achieve this for categories, groups and other meta-content that I understand are saved in the DB. This makes it very hard since you would need to capture them as incremental updates to the DB (e.g. I used flyway as an example).
In the end I would like to build a pipeline to maintain the forum and push changes to production. I am not looking for automated tests, but at least a staging (QA like) environment. For this ideally you would capture some production events to get a real feel of how it will look. This however is a very complex setup, so a dummy DB in staging would suffice.
I am not sure if I can achieve this without a DB dump somehow. This is why I am asking if someone has more experience and knows what can be versioned.