Title: sshfs - mounting with private key
Date: 2014-05-15
Lang: en

To analyze data on a customer's server, I often hack together small [Groovy](http://groovy.codehaus.org) scripts. I type tiny scripts right in the editor on the remote side but sometimes it's tedious to type over a slowish ssh connection.

[sshfs](http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html) seems to come in quite handy in this case. However everytime I tried before I was unable to make sshfs work with ssh keys (password auth is disabled on the customer machines).

Now I stumbled over the [Arch Linux](https://www.archlinux.org/)' Wiki which had the right bit of info hidden inside of their [sshfs documentation page](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/sshfs).

Long story short: To mount via sshfs using an existing ssh key, use

    sshfs -o IdentityFile=/path/to/the/ssh/private/key host:/dir /mountpoint

This approach even works with an ssh agent. Make sure that you get all prompts out of the way (i.e. asking for the key password etc) before mounting.