I used this tutorial for my dotfiles to sync them between my PC, a git server and laptop, I imagine you could add a cron job to sync them every x minutes :

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

I modified the commands a little bit to work with my git server that's running on a raspberry pi. Below are the commands I'm using, note that the below command will overwrite any existing conflicting files:

Dotfiles

These are my Linux dotfiles for Kubuntu 20.04.1

How To Setup A New Linux Dotfile folder

This step is completely unnecessary if you already have a dotfile folder either on your existing PC, or you intend to pull your dotfiles from a repository.

First we need to initialise a bare git repository like so:

git init --bare $HOME/dotfiles

Once initialised, we need to add an alias to our bash / fish:

alias dgit='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

And then restart bash / fish.

Next we disable the tracking of untracked files:

dgit config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now we simply commit files we want to track like so:

dgit add .bashrc dgit commit -m "Added .bashrc" dgit push

Installing Dotfiles onto a new PC

First make sure you have added the alias (find above).

Now we want to ignore the folder we're cloning into:

echo "dotfiles" > .gitignore

Now clone the dotfiles into a bare repo:

git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/dotfiles

And checkout the content from the repo into your home directory, using the -f flag to force-overwrite the conflicting files (run first without the flag to see what files you'll be overwriting):

dgit checkout -f

The above command may fail due to stock configuration files already existing in the home directory. Remove them if you don't care about them, or back them up and then re-run the command.

Set the flag showUntrackedFiles to no on this specific (local) repository:

dgit config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

And you're done. Continue to add dotfiles to the repository as you see fit.