borndeli / sshfs

A network filesystem client to connect to SSH servers

Abstract

This is a filesystem client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol. Since most SSH servers already support this protocol it is very easy to set up: i.e. on the server side there's nothing to do. On the client side mounting the filesystem is as easy as logging into the server with ssh.

The idea of sshfs was taken from the SSHFS filesystem distributed with LUFS, which I found very useful. There were some limitations of that codebase, so I rewrote it. Features of this implementation are:

• Based on FUSE (the best userspace filesystem framework for Linux ;)

• Multithreading: more than one request can be on it's way to the server

• Allowing large reads (max 64k)

• Caching directory contents

• Reconnect on failure

Latest version

The latest version and more information can be found on http://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

How to mount a filesystem

Once sshfs is installed (see next section) running it is very simple:

sshfs hostname: mountpoint

Note, that it's recommended to run it as user, not as root. For this to work the mountpoint must be owned by the user. If the username is different on the host you are connecting to, then use the "username@host:" form. If you need to enter a password sshfs will ask for it (actually it just runs ssh which ask for the password if needed). You can also specify a directory after the ":". The default is the home directory.

Also many ssh options can be specified (see the manual pages for sftp(1) and ssh_config(5)), including the remote port number (-oport=PORT)

To unmount the filesystem:

fusermount -u mountpoint

Installing

First you need to download FUSE 2.2 or later from http://github.com/libfuse/libfuse.

You also need to install the devel package for glib2.0. After installing FUSE, compile sshfs the usual way:

./configure
make
make install (as root)

And you are ready to go.

If checking out from git for the first time also do autoreconf -i before doing ./configure.