How To Use SSHFS on macOS

how-tomacossystems administration
Written By Peter Girnus

Using sshfs is a great way to mount a remote drive from AWS, Azure, or any remote machine to your local mac. Installing sshfs is a relatively straightforward process.

Prerequisites & Installation

Be sure that you can SSH to your target machine using SSH keys. If you’re remote machine is a Windows machine you may need to setup SSH.

Download and Install the OSXFuse and SSHFS packages as admin.

Create a local folder to access your remote filesystem.

mkdir /tmp/sshfs

Mount Filesystem

Example usage of sshfs.

sshfs username@remote:/remote/directory /mount/point

Unmount Filesystem

If you cant eject the drive in finder can force the unmount.

diskutil umount force /mount/point

Debugging Connection Issues

Sometimes you may want a more verbose output when trying to mount a drive with sshfs. This can help you diagnose connection-related issues etc.

sshfs -odebug,sshfs_debug,loglevel=debug username@remote:/remote/directory /mount/point

Want to learn how to use SSHFS on Windows?

If you’d like to comprehensive tutorial on how to setup SSHFS on Windows you can follow this tutorial in which I go through the downloading and installation of SSHFS on Windows.

Other Resources

If this blog post was helpful, check out some of my other blog posts. I post routinely on general information technology, programming, and cybersecurity topics.

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Need some more help?

I’m always here to help if you run into any issues, reach out on social media!

Peter Girnus
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