Why waste the time to set this up? Why not just work with your files via FTP? Trust me, if you are a Mac user and do any work on fileservers / web hosts across the internet this tip can save you lots of time. And its free.

If you do any web design / development you are likely very familiar with juggling files via FTP and your editor of choice. Some editors have very nice integration with some form of file handling. I will commend Dreamweaver and Coda for this. My choice however is TextMate. TextMate has no integrated file handling. What is a guy to do.

After some digging I came across MacFUSE and Macfusion.

Macfusion is an open source Mac application that allows you to work with files on servers across the internet, as if they were sitting on your computer. – Macfusion’s web site

This means that it is now possible to mount your web hosted drive as a local disk.

Macfusion at work

This is really simple to do. First download MacFUSE. This is only a prerequisite for Macfusion.

…installing the MacFUSE software package will let you use any 3rd-party file system written atop MacFUSE. – MacFUSE’s web site.

Then get Macfusion and run the installer.

Now, if you are using Snow Leopard, there is one quick fix that must be done (unless it has been fixed or updated.) Open your System Preferences and click on MacFUSE. Put a check in the “Show Beta Versions” and then click “Check For Updates.” Update to the latest version. Then, launch Terminal. If you have never used the terminal don’t worry. It can be intimidating but it is very powerful. It is located in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder. Once it loads enter this command:

rm /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshnodelay.so

After running the above script close the terminal, launch Macfusion and click on plus sign, choose FTP of SFTP and enter your user name and password.

Adding an additional fileserver to Macfusion

Now just click on Mount.

If you open a Finder window you will see your web drive mounted as if it were on your local computer. Pretty sweet eh?