sshfs 2025.11.0

SSH Filesystem -- Async SSH/SFTP backend for fsspec

sshfs

sshfs is an implementation of fsspec for the SFTP protocol using asyncssh.

Features

• A complete implementation of the fsspec protocol through SFTP
• Supports features outside of the SFTP (e.g server side copy through SSH command execution)
• Quite fast (compared to alternatives like paramiko)
• Builtin Channel Management
• Async! (thanks to asyncssh)

Tutorial

Install the sshfs from PyPI or the conda-forge. This will install fsspec and register sshfs for ssh:// urls, so you can open files using:

from fsspec import open

with open('ssh://[user@]host[:port]/path/to/file', "w") as file:
    file.write("Hello World!")

with open('ssh://[user@]host[:port]/path/to/file', "r") as file:
    print(file.read())

For more operations, you can use the SSHFileSystem class directly:

from sshfs import SSHFileSystem

To connect with a password, you can simply specify username/password as keyword arguments and connect to the host of your choosing;

# Connect with a password
fs = SSHFileSystem(
    '127.0.0.1',
    username='sam',
    password='fishing'
)

If you want to use a private key to authenticate, you can either pass a string pointing to the path of the key, or give a list of them to be tried:

# or with a private key
fs = SSHFileSystem(
    'ssh.example.com',
    client_keys=['/path/to/ssh/key']
)

Note: you can also pass client_keys as an argument to fsspec.open.

All operations and their descriptions are specified here. Here are a few example calls you can make, starting with info() which allows you to retrieve the metadata about given path;

>>> details = fs.info('/tmp')
>>> print(f'{details["name"]!r} is a {details["type"]}!')
'/tmp/' is a directory!
>>>
>>> crontab = fs.info('/etc/crontab')
>>> print(f'{crontab["name"]!r} is a {crontab["type"]}!')
'/etc/crontab' is a file!

You can also create new files through either putting a local file with put_file or opening a file in write mode;

>>> with fs.open('/tmp/message.dat', 'wb') as stream:
...     stream.write(b'super secret message!')
...

And either download it through get_file or simply read it on the fly with opening it;

>>> with fs.open('/tmp/message.dat') as stream:
...     print(stream.read())
...
b'super secret message!'

There are also a lot of other basic filesystem operations, such as mkdir, touch and find;

>>> fs.mkdir('/tmp/dir')
>>> fs.mkdir('/tmp/dir/eggs')
>>> fs.touch('/tmp/dir/spam')
>>> fs.touch('/tmp/dir/eggs/quux')
>>>
>>> for file in fs.find('/tmp/dir'):
...     print(file)
...
/tmp/dir/eggs/quux
/tmp/dir/spam

If you want to list a directory but not it's children, you can use ls();

>>> [(detail['name'], detail['type']) for detail in fs.ls('/tmp/dir', detail=True)]
[('/tmp/dir/spam', 'file'), ('/tmp/dir/eggs', 'directory')]