Amit Singh - you have a new fan.
One thing about OS X that has bugged me is the fact you can’t mount an SSH server as part of the file system. You can mount Windows servers (using Samba), you can mount other Macs, and even NFS, but it wasn’t possible to mount an SSH server. In addition, you can only mount FTP in read only.
I only use SFTP (file transfer over SSH) to upload to servers, and in the past I’ve used Cyberduck or Fugu, but it would be the cat’s meow to just use the Finder.
It’s bugged me because I’ve been able to mount SSH servers in Nautilus on Linux for quite a while. It’s made possible in Linux by an application called FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace).
This incredibly cool fellow, Amit Singh, has ported FUSE to Mac - dubbed MacFUSE. MacFUSE allows you to mount pretty much anything you can think of as a file system on your Mac, but the part I really care about is that it comes with sshfs.
I couldn’t find a nice howto on the project page, so here is a small movie on how to actually mount and unmount an SSH server on your Mac:
Amit Singh, you are my hero. To see some of the cool stuff you can do with MacFUSE check out his demo
Thanks! Could you reshoot the video at a higher resolution? I can barely make out what you’re typing in the Terminal and what icons to click on.
It was clear before I uploaded it to youtube :(. I’ll try to redo it when I have some time, but in the meantime:
$ cd Desktop
$ mkdir BuildServer
$ sshfs rob@192.168.1.3:/home/rob BuildServer
Then to unmount
$ umount ~/Desktop/BuildServer
I just looked at the MacFUSE project page and it looks like they broke out MacFUSE Core and SSHFS into two separate .dmgs. You’ll more-than-likely have to download and install both to get it to work properly now.
The sshfs-xxx.dmg is a little app that basically does what you did but with an app. This is damned awesome! Finally I can mount my SSH based sites and edit them via CFEclipse!
Well spotted that man!
Hey thanks a lot for your page. I see they now have a graphical app that bundles up all the step by step command line actions you showed.
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SSHFS