Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to develop directly on a remote server with all the creature comforts that you have on your local machine? While it is often good practise to develop an ML model on a small subset of data on your laptop before moving to a remote (speed of iteration, compute cost etc.) you often want to treat the remote server as an extension of your laptop environment.
One appraoch would be to continually edit and push changes from local to remote. This however quickly becomes a drag and adds substantial friction to your workflow. By mounting a remote server on to laptop I’m able to do away with pushing and pulling and treat the remote as an extension of my local. In addition I can use all my favourite productivity tools installed on my local (eg. Sublime Text) direct on the remote file system.
Installing SSHFS
MAC OSX
Install SSHFS on Mac OSX by downloading FUSE and SSHFS from the osxfuse site.
Linux
Use your standard package manager:
On Ubuntu/Debian
apt-get sshfs
On Centos/Red Hat
yum install sshfs
Mount the Remote File System
First we need to create an empty directory to mount the file system on. Traditionally this should be a directory in the /mnt dir. I like to give the mount directory the name ing convention <user>@<server>:
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/<user>@<server>
If your server access is password-based to mount the remote file system simply run
sudo sshfs -o allow_other,defer_permissions <user>@<server>:/ /mnt/<user>@<server>
if you have set up keypairs instead run
sudo sshfs -o allow_other,defer_permissions,IdentityFile=~/.ssh/id_rsa <user>@<server>:/ /mnt/<user>@<server>
Unmounting the RFS
To unmount
umount /mnt/<user>@<server>
Making it easier
To make it even easier is usally set up a couple of alias in my ~/.bashrc
alias mount_<server>="sudo sshfs -o allow_other,defer_permissions,IdentityFile=~/.ssh/id_rsa <user>@<server>:/ /mnt/<user>@<server>"
alias unmount_<server>="umount /mnt/<user>@<server>"
You are able to mount multiple RFS at a time (obviously you need to create unique mount directories for each).