I am adding an fstab method, since no one talks about it in this page. If you don't want hacks and use the builtin advanced mounting features, you need to use /etc/fstab and never look back. ​

user@host:/remote/folder /mount/point fuse.sshfs noauto,x-systemd.automount,_netdev,IdentityFile=/home/name/.ssh/id_rsa,allow_other,reconnect 0 0

​

• noauto will stop the no-brainer actions like forcibly mounting whatsoever at booting regardless if the network is up or not.
• x-systemd.automount is the smart daemon that knows when to mount.
• The _netdev tag will also identify that it uses network devices, thus it will wait until the network is up. ​​​​​​

You could create a launcher and add it to your launcher bar by drag&dropping the .desktop-file there:

    #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

    [Desktop Entry]
    Version=1.0
    Type=Application
    Terminal=false
    Icon[en_US]=nautilus
    Name[en_US]=Connect to xy
    Exec=shfs [email protected]:/dir/dir /home/username/mount/xxx
    #OR: to mount and than open in nautilus (note the '/dir' where ':dir' used to be)
    #Exec=nautilus sftp://[email protected]/dir/dir
    Comment[en_US]=Connect to xy via ssh
    Name=Connect to xy
    Comment=Connect to xy via ssh
    Icon=nautilus

Suggestion - even less work:

If you want even less work (=autoconnect) and a graphical user interface, you might want to check out Gigolo . It has the capability of auto-mounting a bookmark, whenever the bookmarked filesystem is present. You might want to check that out.

sudo apt-get install gigolo   # or use the install link above

Run gigolo. There is an option in the preferences that puts it into autostart and another to activate the tray icon. Check both. Then add your bookmark.

Here is a screenshot:

Shell way

Another solution would be to put the following line in your crontab (edit /etc/crontab with sudo privileges):

@reboot sshfs [email protected]:/dir/dir /home/username/mount/xxx

But since Ubuntu's password manager is not present when the command is run you need to use a password-less private/public key pair to authenticate with the ssh server in question (or a similar method of authentication). This would mount it on every reboot.

Yet another solution would be to edit your /etc/fstab (providing your Ubuntu-Version provides that option).

This forum thread shows a method of creating an automounting SSHFS which seems to me exactly what you would like to do.

You can simply type this to a shell script, and you can create a launcher for it at the desktop.

For example mountssh.sh:

#!/bin/bash
shfs [email protected]:/dir/dir /home/username/mount/xxx

make sure to chmod +x mountssh.sh and then clicking it will execute

Alternatively, you can mount it via gvfs, by right clicking at the desktop, and creating a launcher with URL parameter: ssh://[email protected]/dir/dir. By default it mounts to ~/.gvfs/.... If you want stick with the /home/username/mount/xxx, you can create symlink from the gvfs one to this.

You could even take it a step further and have autofs take care of the mounting for you. Since autofs doesn't work particularly well with SSH public key authentication (unless you want to create a passwordless key pair for the superuser), there are tools that allow you to use the user's SSH keys, ssh-agent and keychain:

• autosshfs: per user SSHFS automount using user's SSH configuration
• afuse: an automounter implemented with FUSE

I mount a folder the exact same way, what i did was create a custom launcher that points to a .sh file that contains the command. Just make sure the file has execution permission and you're good to go.

I just click on the launcher:

I tried to use cron to automatically mount ssh directory, but it causes an error saying Network is unreachable. It is because the cron job execution is too early to establish ip connections. After I inserted sleep before the sshfs command, it successfully mount the ssh directory.

sleep 5 && sshfs ......

So I made this script to fulfill my requirement.

#! /bin/sh
while true
do 
    ping -c1 -w1 ssh_server_ip > /dev/null && break
done
sshfs -o reconnect,ServerAliveInterval=15,ServerAliveCountMax=3 sshname:/mountpath /localmountpath

Since none of the answers worked for me and I managed to figure this out, I figured I should share it with the world. My solution also autoreconnects when the mount disconnects and works when the machine boots up without problems. Just add this to your /etc/fstab file (one-liner):

[email protected]:/  /mnt/location   fuse.sshfs    defaults,allow_other,_netdev,IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/id_rsa,default_permissions,uid=YOURIDHERE,gid=YOURIDHERE,follow_symlinks,reconnect    0  0

Some notes:

You NEED SSH keys for this apparently. You can copy your SSH keys using ssh-copy-id or manually - which one you prefer. The automounting only works with SSH keys in other words. You can troubleshoot the SSH connection with editing the fstab file and then calling mount -av.

allow_other allows when the root has mounted the automount that not only the root can access it.

IdentityFile is the necessary pointer to the SSH key as evidenced in Arch Wiki, but apparently not described what syntax it uses. Just don't forget to replace the placeholders for uid and gid ;) I think you can comma separate the IDs, but I haven't tried it.

This was super useful for my Nextcloud instance, since I wanted to remotely mount an external storage box and follow_symlinks allows the required functionality for supporting symlinks in the mount, which is required for Nextcloud when you start using external storage and similar stuff.