Mounting remote folders with SSHFS

SSHFS is filesystem based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). If you have server with enabled SSH protocol it’s 99% that this server supports SFTP out of the box. It comes very handy when you are working with remote servers and want to use favorite text editor and environment to work with remote files.

Some of the use cases are:

• Uploading your site content
• Storing images on remote server
• Syncing files

Installing on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Installing on Mac OS X

brew install sshfs

Using

# create local dir in your home for remote connections
mkdir ~/external
# create local dir that should be mapped to remote dir
mkdir ~/external/guruser.somehost
# mount remote dir to your local dir
sshfs guruser@somehost:/home/guruser ~/external/guruser.somehost/

Example: if you want to use rsync but your server doesn’t have rsync installed you can always mount preferred remote directory via sshfs and sync it with rsync just like between local directories.

Links

• SSH Filesystem
• rsync
• homebrew