How to automount SSHFS volumes with FUSE OS X on Mavericks

Question

Iv'e managed to get my ssh volumes mounted with SSHFS via the command line but would really like is to have them auto mount on login. So far, I've set up a launchAgent to run a shell script that contains the commands I would use in the terminal. That contains:

mkdir /Volumes/mysshfsvolume
sshfs blah blah blah

This works via the terminal but when the launchAgent loads, It seems momentarily mount the volumes and then they disappear.

I have seen other older solutions that include editing the /etc/fstab, AppleSrcipt and automator but I am looking for a Mavericks related solution. I have actually found a way around it using ControlPlane but just wondering if anybody has more extensive knowledge of how automount works on Mavericks. TIA.

Just to add some information, I'm not too familiar with the systems that I'm logging into but one is a SUN Solaris and the other is a RHE linux server.

I also tried just adding the script to my login items and it works for the linux connection but not the SUN server.

Answer 1

I have using Homebrew and its sshfs bundle to mount SSH filesystems on my Mavericks Mac for a while now, it has been solid.

So if you run Homebrew go ahead and try the following to install sshfs: brew install sshfs. Then maybe reboot (?) and once you're back sshfs <username>@<hostname/IP>:<remote-path> <local-path>. You will get a password prompt at this point if you're using that kind of authentication. If you're using SSH keys then probably no prompt.

Update: maybe you should modify your bash script to use nohup. it sounds almost like the process dies after it runs your bash script. checkout nohup on wiki or man nohup.

Answer 2

Make sure you set up SSH keys with both servers you're trying to connect to. Once you've done this, you can create a simple shell script to connect to your server. Something like this should do:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /Volumes/mysshfsvolume
sshfs blah blah blah

Once you've got your shell script set up, you can set it up to run at login by using plist files. plist files for Mac are like supercharged cron jobs. You can set them up to run at specific intervals, run at system boot, or run when a certain user logs in. In your case, you would want it to run every time you log in. You can glean some more info from this Stack question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1370901/very-simple-launchd-plist-not-running-my-script

(just a side note)

If you happen to use a server host like Digital Ocean which provides an API, you can get even fancier with your script and use the API to automatically find every server on your account, and auto mount each one at login. I had a neat script set up that SSHFS'd all of my servers on my DO account, and even picked up new ones when they were added.