Does Nautilus remote mounting use SSHFS?

Does Nautilus' (Ubuntu 16.x or 17.x) remote file system mounting using SSHFS or something else?

Note to Moderators: For keyword purposes, I've tagged this with "Files" because, although the application being discussed is technically called Nautilus, this is not stated basically anywhere in the Ubuntu GUI - it's always referred to as "Files" instead. So, newbies like myself searched using that keyword.

1 Answer

You can press Ctrl+L and enter SSH address here in Nautilus/Files (and Caja) - for example:

sftp://localhost/

This will create GVFS-mountpoint in /run/user/$UID/gvfs/ (in this example /run/user/$UID/gvfs/sftp:host=localhost):

$ mount | grep gvfs
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)

So Nautilus/Files (and Caja) uses GVFS.

If you want you can mount folder via SSHFS:

sudo apt-get install sshfs
mkdir ~/sshfs
sshfs :/ ~/sshfs

Then Nautilus/Files (and Caja) will show it in Devices section.

Nautilus can't unmount it by Unmount because of bug 254171.
One can use sudo fusermount -u ~/sshfs for this purpose.