Mounting an OSX SSH Volume using FUSE and SSHFS

FUSE for OSX is a Mac OSX port of the popular Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) software, and a successor to MacFUSE. Once installed you have the ability to mount many different types of remote and local file-system in userland, without the need to alter the kernel. An example filesystem that I have found to be very useful is SSHFS, which allows you to interact with files located on a remote server, via the SSH protocol. Once mounted the specified remote directory can be accessed as if it were a local volume.

Example Usage

With both FUSE for OSX and SSHFS installed, you can simply add a new mounted volume in the terminal using the command below. An issue that you have surely encountered is OSX’s love of polluting directories with .DS_Store files. We can disable this however, on a mount-by-mount basis by including the ‘noappledouble’ option.

$ mkdir ~/example
$ sshfs user@host:/example ~/example -oauto_cache,reconnect,defer_permissions,negative_vncache,noappledouble,volname=Example

Looking at the example command above you will notice that we must first create the directory (‘example’) we wish to mount the remote filesystem to. Finally, once we are done with the volume we can by unmount it using the command below.

$ umount ~/example