Mounting remote SFTP/SSH shares on Mac OSX 10.9
If you’ve always wanted a way to mount a remote SFTP/SSH accessible folder on your Mac OSX 10.9, well now there is a way to get you there!
Basically you will have access to the remote share to access files. It will be SFTP over the SSH protocol and fully encrypted.
Getting started
Start by downloading the following files:
Install OSXFuse and then SSHFS.
Mount your SSHFS share
Create an empty folder (using your Terminal) that will want to access the remote share on (folder becomes the mount point).
mkdir /Users/jakub/Mounts/remoteMountDir/
And then create your SSHFS mount with the following command to your remote server:
sshfs -p 22 sshUsername@remoteServerAddress:/path/to/remote/folder /Users/jakub/Mounts/remoteMountDir
The -p 22 is your SSH port in case you use something nonstandard. You will be asked to authenticate (username + password) to mount your share. Once that is done, it should be visible in Finder.
Unmounting
To unmount the SSHFS share use this command:
umount -f /Users/jakub/Mounts/remoteMountDir
Caveats
- This process is just like using SFTP, but in your Finder
- You can use your Sublime Text to ‘add folder to Project’ and work ‘locally’
- If the remote files change or are changed, the change will not be updated in finder unless you refresh the folder, the SSH server does not notify SSHFS about file changes (there are ways to expire the cache for always refreshing every folder). This is a big issue you might run into as you might overwrite changed files, so know who/what is editing files.
- It may be slower than normal file/folder navigation