Mounting Remote Server for editing files on my Mac

Question

My web development server is in the Cloud and I am very new to Macs.

On Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux, I would mount the remote drives using sshfs. I have researched SSHFS for Mac and come up with FUSE for OS x and MacFUSE. I have them both installed but when I attempt to run man sshfs on my commandline I get a command not found error.

Unless I am missing something, I can't find simple instructions to help me resolve this issue.

I have tried Mount and Mount_smbfs too but I immediately get server connection failed: operation timed out errors.

My Mac runs on OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63)

Can anyone please give me some simple steps to help overcome this obstacle?

Answer 1

First, you don't want to have both MacFUSE and FUSE for OS X (OSXFUSE) installed, OSXFUSE is a replacement for MacFUSE, which is no longer under active development.

OSXFUSE is not an application, it is a kernel extension and libraries that allow developers to easily write a file system that lives in user space rather than in the kernel. Once you have it installed you need to then install a file system, in your case sshfs, which can be found on the OSXFUSE website (http://osxfuse.github.io/).

Once you have both OSXFUSE and sshfs installed then you still won't have a Mac application, but you will have a command line tool sshfsin /usr/local/bin and a man sshfs at the command line will give you the manual page for it.

If you would like a GUI then you can install Macfusion (http://macfusionapp.org/) and follow the instructions here (https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/SSHFS#macfusion) so that it uses the much more reliable OSXFUSE version of sshfs rather than the MacFUSE based one it ships with.

Answer 2

It looks like the software might not be installed the right way, or in the right place. On a Mac, the easiest way to install sshfs and fuse is with Homebrew.

1. Install Homebrew http://brew.sh/

2. brew install sshfs

   This will install dependencies such as fuse4x. Read all the instructions that appear -- some of other steps may be required, such as

brew link fuse4x 
sudo /bin/cp -rfX /usr/local/Cellar/fuse4x-kext/0.9.2/Library/Extensions/fuse4x.kext /Library/Extensions 
sudo chmod +s /Library/Extensions/fuse4x.kext/Support/load_fuse4x

Answer 3

If you have installed Fuse for OSX you will find the binary you are searching at /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static.

You can use ln -s [Path-like-above] [Your-favorit-bin-path]/sshfs if you want to call it with sshfs.

If you get a command not found error and not a No manual entry for sshfs, then man is not found and this indicates no issue with sshfs.

Answer 4

A more modern approach without a kernel extension providing FUSE on macOS is:

FUSE-T

They also distribute an adapted version of SSHFS, that works with FUSE-T.

There is no recent version of SSHFS for Macs available. The versions I found are:

• tormodwill macSSHFS for macFUSE: 2.10.1 (2017)
• FUSE-T's sshfs: 2.9 (2017)
• macFUSE's sshfs: 2.5 (2015)

(latest version on Linux is 3.7.3 from 2022 using libfuse3)

So either use closed source macFUSE with tormodwill's macSSHFS or FUSE-T.

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Installation

macFUSE, tormodwill's macSSHFS, FUSE-T and FUSE-T's sshfs are all .pkg files, that can be ctrl-click-opened for installation. Either chose macFUSE with tormodwill's macSSHFS or FUSE-T with its SSHFS.

Uninstallation

To uninstall macFUSE open the System Preferences of macOS, go to the macFUSE preference pane and click on "Remove macFUSE".

To uninstall macFUSE's sshfs:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sshfs
sudo rm /usr/local/share/man/man1/sshfs.1
sudo pkgutil --forget com.github.osxfuse.pkg.SSHFS

To uninstall tormodwill's macSSHFS do the following:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sshfs
sudo rm /usr/local/share/man/man1/sshfs.1
sudo pkgutil --forget com.TWILL.pkg.macSSHFS

To uninstall FUSE-T do:

sudo "/Library/Application Support/fuse-t/uninstall.sh"

To uninstall FUSE-T-SSHFS do:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/sshfs
sudo rm /usr/local/share/man/man1/sshfs.1
sudo pkgutil --forget "$(pkgutil --pkgs | grep "^org\.sshfs\.")"

---

There is a simple menubar GUI application for mounting and unmounting SSHFS connections (of which I am the author):

SSHFS-Mountlet

The above installation and uninstalltion hints are taken from SSHFS-Mountlet's README.

Answer 5

A solution as of 2024

For reference, I ended up here because I was trying to get a more usable environment to access google cloud services.

1 - It seems that the current solution is now called 'macFUSE'. The link for OSXfuse, above, leads to a page that discusses MacFUSE. Also on that page, there are mentions of 'stable releases'. Two are mentioned, at present: MacFuse 4.8.0 and SSHFuse 2.5.0. At the time of writing this, MacFuse 4.8.0 appeared to be most recently released last month - for macOS 10.9 or later Apple Silicon or Intel Released on 11 Jun 2024.

Both packages need to be installed in order for the system to recognize the sshfs command and successfully mount the remote file system.

When I went to install MacFuse on Apple Silicon M3, I had to follow instructions provided by the installer to enable system extensions. It was easy enough to follow the instructions, but perhaps not for the faint of heart, and not for someone that doesn't understand the implications of doing so.

2 - The authors of MacFuse tell you NOT to use other package managers (such as brew) because those packages are not maintained by the developers.

Fortunately, when I attempted to install via brew, as per the suggestion for this question above, it failed, citing that the packages it needed to install required Linux (and not Darwin/Mac) -- which was kind of a weird message to see for a package manager meant to install software usually meant for Linux on OSX. In my mind, this kind of proves the point of not using other package managers because those packages are not maintained by the MacFuse developers.