Nothing revolutionary or EC2-specific here. The article could well be titled "Mounting an SSH host on OS X using OSXFuse".

Apparently sshfs is news enough in the Mac community that it seems like a Cool Trick instead of a standard tool.

fair point...

I would really recommend against using MacFUSE if you're not using Lion. I've had MacFUSE hang my system on a daily basis until I figured out the problem.

I recommend using ExpanDrive [I write it] - it works great on Lion and does some aggressive caching to make this a much more usable solution.

As a paid ExpanDrive user, I second this. It's good software.

What was the problem?

I use MacFuse on Snow Leopard daily at work and home and the worst I've ever seen was TextMate move slow when I woke from sleep (and the drive wasn't mounted)

Building code, doing a "find .", any type of disk-heavy operation was like playing russian roulette.

This warning is much clearer (and useful). I completely agree -- disk-heavy moves can be painful.

On that note, if you're using TextMate with MacFusion/SSHFS, you'll want to get the ReMate plugin. It disables refresh on regaining focus for TextMate: http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/. No more beachball when you bounce over to the browser for a second :)

Yeah - I had lots of troubles with MacFUSE in the past as well...so far (only a couple of days really) I've had no problems with OSXFuse though.

Cool. I've been testing out an app called ExpandDrive which does something similar but it hangs like crazy if network bandwidth goes up.

You can also use Transmit to do this.

ps. Started using Transmit and ReMate plugin and everything runs much more smoothly. Thanks for the advice.

For Windows there is Dokan, a library similar to FUSE in Linux. There is an implementation of SSHFS for windows which works pretty well. http://dokan-dev.net/en

I use this version of macfuse for lion

http://wualablog.blogspot.com/2011/07/wuala-for-os-x-lion.ht...

You can also do this on Windows with ExpanDrive [http://www.expandrive.com]

Transmit

Is this over ssh? Couldn't you use s3fs for this?

I think s3fs is more for mounting a S3 bucket as a drive...what I wanted to do was access the files on my EC2 instance as local files (EC2 is basically like a remote computer, S3 is just remote storage).

That being said, you might be able to use s3fs to accomplish the same thing...I just wrote this up because it's the solution that I use...could be (probably is) better ways to accomplish this...

Sorry, my bad. I got ec2 and s3 all mixed up. Thanks for clarifying!

Why not just use rsync or scp?

I didn't find any Mac clients that I liked for either of these approaches...and what I wanted was a really simple way to be able to edit files on my EC2 instance using TextMate...this solution works really well for me to do just that (though there could be much better ways to accomplish this that I just didn't bother to research/figure out).

I use Cyberduck[1] for that; just hit Edit and it opens up the file in your editor, syncs back when you save.

[1] http://cyberduck.ch/

I've used CyberDuck in the past too...of the SFTP options, I liked it the best.

With this mapping option, I can drop down to Terminal app...move to the directory, and then mate * to open a whole project within TextMate (great for searching all files in a project and other little things)...and I can also do other comand line like things, but semi-locally...so just a bit more powerful for my personal use cases is all.