The fine folks at Google have done an incredible job of porting FUSE to the Mac, and have also created sshfs, which is incredibly useful. Unfortunately, sshfs is officially unsupported, and bug reports are not welcome on the MacFUSE page (and there's really no other place for them). To remedy the situation, and to make sshfs useable to more people, I am forking the project and providing an updated package here.

Download: sshfs-leopard.dmg (also needed: MacFUSE)

Source code: Hosted on Launchpad

Currently, the only change in the package on this page is that I have added an option that is required in Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) to make the mounted drive show up in Finder. This takes around 30 seconds, but it does appear. Despite its name, the package also works on Tiger (Mac OS 10.4), but there should be no difference at this point between the package here and the one from Google.

You will still need MacFUSE installed before you can use sshfs. MacFUSE has a very nice installer that only takes a few seconds to run. The sshfs disk image contains a single program (also named sshfs), which you have to drag into your applications folder to run – it will not work directly from the disk image!

I am planning on making further enhancements, especially to the GUI. I will post more once that is done. The source code of my changed version is available under the same license (Apache) as the original code.

What is sshfs?

Secure shell (ssh) is the standard way of connecting to remote Unix/Linux servers like web or file servers. In addition, ssh provides a means of transferring files, called sftp (Secure File Transfer Protocol). sshfs is built on top of this to let you use the Finder rather than a command-line interface. Your remote server appears like a local or network drive, you can copy files back forth, delete files, create directories, etc. This makes working on remote websites, etc., considerably less tedious and more efficient.