Yesterday I shared about using SFTP onto a remote server and I stated that one of the weaknesses of SFTP is not able to move multiple files at the same time. Therefore, SSHFS solved this problem.

What is SSHFS?

SSHFS is an open source project on github, where you can mount a remote file system through SFTP.

Installation

On Windows

There is a good guide written by digital ocean on installation on windows.

On Linux

You can check out the github release of the library.

On Mac

I just use brew install sshfs to install it.

The full guide is on github

sudo chown -R $(whoami):staff /usr/local/Caskroom
brew cask install osxfuse
sudo reboot
brew install sshfs

Get started

The command is quite simple.

sshfs [user@]hostname:[directory] mountpoint

where

• user@hostname is the way you sign in with ssh,
• directory is the directory you want to mount from the server
• mountpoint is the directory you want to mount on your local machine

sample command sshfs root@IP_ADDRESS:/root ./server2

The result

Once it is mounted, it looks like this on Mac.

When you click into it, it takes a while to load all the files, then it shows out how your files looks like on the remote server.

Done!

Conclusion

SSHFS also used SFTP, but it makes it easier and faster to use than FTP. Overall, I find it really useful to quickly move files into it, but to do normal operations like file editing, I still prefer using SSH with Vim (as it is faster).