How to mount a folder on amazon ec2 instance with private key using sshfs

Question

I am trying to mount a folder on my amazon ec2 instance to my desktop folder using sshfs.

The problem is that I am not able to figure out how to give the option for private key (awskey.pem).

Normally I ssh using

ssh ec2-user@{amz-ip-address} -i {path to amzkey.pem}

But sshfs has no such options. However I saw a -F option and tried

sshfs ec2-user@{amz-ip-address}:{amz-folder}  {my mount dir} -F {path to amzkey.pem}

This gave me an error

"read: Connection reset by peer"

Please let me know if anyone has tried this before.

Bonaparte

Answer 1

From the documentation:

If you are using non-default key names and are passing it as -i .ssh/my_key, this won't work. You have to use -o IdentityFile=/home/user/.ssh/my_key, with the full path to the key.

Maegan

And I just confirmed that this works. +1. This answer should be accepted. – Gyrostatic

I also found that you must use full, explicit path of local folder. For instance, ~/remoteDir did not work for me while /home/user/remoteDir does. – Georgiana

In my case the issue was with a relative path to the key. Worked ok with an absoulte path. – Abstraction

Answer 2

Here is the command for anyone trying this in future

sudo sshfs {username}@{ipaddress}:{remote folder path}  {local folder path} -o IdentityFile={full path to the private key file} -o allow_other

Bonaparte

What -o allow_other does here? – Gregggreggory

"-o allow_other" allows for non sudo access to the mounted directory. this is useful when sshfs itself needed sudo, so without "-o allow_other" you'd have to work with su on the mounted directory for every command – Bunyip

I can confirm this works great and with Sublime. Thanks! – Cesura