Automount disk with sshfs when needed, with autofs

From the ubuntu documentation

autofs is a program for automatically mounting directories on an as-needed basis. Auto-mounts are mounted only as they are accessed, and are unmounted after a period of inactivity. Because of this, automounting NFS/Samba shares conserves bandwidth and offers better overall performance compared to static mounts via fstab.

Install the autofs package

In Debian:

sudo apt-get install autofs

And edit the file /etc/auto.master by adding this line:

/mnt/sshfs /etc/auto.sshfs uid=1000,gid=1000,--timeout=30,--ghost

Replace the uid and gid by your user-id and group-id respectively (obtained respectively with id -u username and id -g username). --timeout=30 is to unmount the disk when you didn’t use it for 30 seconds.

Create the file /etc/auto.sshfs with this content:

mydisk -fstype=fuse,port=22,rw,allow_other :sshfs\#username@host\:/path/to/your/disk/to/mount/

• mydisk is the name of the local directory created
• username is the distant username
• host is the distant host
• /path/to/your/disk/to/mount/ is the path to the directory to mount

Then, reload autofs:

sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

When you will access to /mnt/sshfs/mydisk the disk will be automatically mount. The ssh keys must be properly!