When working with remote Linux servers, file transfer is a common scenario for developers. This doesn’t need to be a hassle. Secure and convenient access to directories can be done with sshfs.

Install sshfs with your favorite package manager.

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Archlinux

sudo pacman -S sshfs

CentOS/Red Hat

sudo yum install sshfs

Windows
win-sshfs is available from the Google Code Archive.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/win-sshfs/

Mac OSX
Mac will require FUSE as well as SSHFS and is available at https://osxfuse.github.io

First create the local directory you would like to access the remote files from.

mkdir /pathto/somedirectoryname

Then mount with sshfs.

sshfs user@ip.address:/pathtoshare /home/user/directory/to/share/to

If you are using key authorization such as when connecting to a remote server like an Amazon EC2 instance, you will need to specify the full path of the key file with the IdentityFile option. Setting the allow_other option will be required as well.

sshfs user@ip.address:/pathtoshare /home/user/directory/to/share/to -o IdentityFile=/home/user/full/path/to/keyfile.pem -o allow_other

sudo umount /pathto/somedirectoryname

sudo vi /etc/fstab

Append another entry with the sshfs setting:

sshfs#user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/ /pathto/somedirectoryname

To load these settings, you can either reboot the machine or reload fstab mounts with the command

mount -a

The directory and their files will now be available locally as if they originated from your system. This will make file transfer and development a hassle free and much easier experience.