Using Macfuse To Mount FTP and SSH as “iDisks”

I’m a huge fan of Macfuse. If you aren’t familiar with it, it allows you to make “mountable” real-looking drives out of remote connections. You can have a virtual disk (like an iDisk) for many different types of accounts. Personally I use this for an ftp account, and a ssh account.

How it works.

Macfuse is the backend that makes all of this possible, it is followed by “plugins” such as sshfs.

With a few clicks, I can have a disk that places all my remote files as a virtual disk on my desktop. You can copy to and from this disk, as well as open files directly from it, eliminating the entire download/upload ftp session.

To install:

1. Download the appropriate release from here.
2. Also Download sshfs from the same location.
3. Install the packages, they are normal OSX packages.

To use:

A GUI front-end is available, it’s called Macfusion. You can download it here.

Macfusion has a menubar interface, you can now connect to any ftp or ssh server and save it to your Macfusion favorites. I’ve tested this app on both Tiger and Leopard.

If you are the terminal type, and you would like to know the command to mount the disk, I have included the sshfs command to do this. You must first create a folder somewhere on your hard drive to allow this to work, here is an example where I created a folder in /Users/jon/ named “Vector” (the name of my remote connection). This will be the mountpoint.

Here is the command.

./Applications/sshfs.app/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static user@server:/home/user -p portnumber /Users/jon/Vector -o volname=Vector

The volname=Vector can be anything, this is the name you’d like the disk to be called.

After you run this command, and type your password in for the ssh session, you will see the disk appear on your desktop, you can now copy files to and from this drive, just as if it were your hard drive. You can also add this command to automator as a terminal command and have an application that mounts this disk.

I use this daily as a quick way to manage files remotely when i don’t want to load up a ftp/sftp program or edit a file directly from the server and save it. It has really sped up my workflow and eliminated a few applications all together.

Macfuse was written by Amit Singh, who now works at Google.