The sshfs tool is a file system client application based on the SSH communication protocol. It could be of great help when you want to mount a remote file system locally and work with the remote files as if they were on your own machine. Most Linux distributions would provide a pre-compiled package for the sshfs client so you should be able to quickly install it on your PC using apt-get, yum, etc.

Using sshfs is actually quite simple. All you need to make sure is that you have SSH connectivity to the remote host and that the SSH server has the SFTP Subsystem enabled.

Let’s say, for example, that you have SSH access to your hosting account and you want to mount your public_html folder on your local machine so that you can easily work on your website files. The following command could be used:

Of course, you should replace 2222 with the port number the SSH service is listening on, user with your own username, server with the server hostname or IP address and /HOSTING with the desired mount point on your local machine.

If you now type the mount command on your local PC, you would notice the remote filesystem among all other mounts on your machine.