sshfs - mounting with private key

To analyze data on a customer’s server, I often hack together small Groovy 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 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‘ Wiki which had the right bit of info hidden inside of their sshfs documentation page.

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.