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@hostnameis the way you sign in with ssh,directoryis the directory you want to mount from the servermountpointis 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).
