mounter

Mount remote SSH directories in your file manager. No FUSE, no Docker, no kernel extensions.

Works on macOS and Linux.

Install

cargo install mounter

Quick start

mounter mount user@server:/path

That's it. Files appear at ~/mnt/server. Press Ctrl-C to stop.

Commands

mounter mount [user@]host:[path] [opts]   Mount and serve (Ctrl-C to stop)
mounter unmount <name|path|all>            Unmount cleanly (handles busy mounts)
mounter list                               Show active mounts

Options:

  -p PORT         SSH port (default: 22)
  -i IDENTITY     SSH identity file
  -n NAME         Share name (default: host)
  --smb-port PORT Local SMB port (default: auto)

How it works

File manager <--SMB2--> mounter (localhost) <--SFTP/SSH--> remote server

A single Rust binary that speaks SMB2 to your OS and SFTP v3 to the remote. It spawns ssh -s sftp as a subprocess — existing SSH keys, config, and agent just work. No kernel extensions, no privileged containers.

Platform support

Performance

Benchmarked against raw ssh cat on the same connection:

Key optimizations:

• Session-level directory cache — macOS sends hundreds of per-file QUERY_DIRECTORY lookups for ls -la; all served from a 15s TTL cache after one SFTP readdir.
• Pipelined SFTP reads — large reads send multiple 256KB requests in parallel to saturate the SSH pipe.
• Read caching — each SFTP response is cached so small resource-fork probes don't trigger extra round-trips.
• Negative caching — Apple metadata files (.DS_Store, ._*, etc.) that never exist on Linux are cached as absent for 60s.

Requirements

• macOS or Linux
• SSH key auth to your remote server

Development

cd crate
cargo test          # 54 unit tests
cargo bench         # criterion benchmarks for hot paths

License

Apache 2.0