4.5 FUSE-based external methods

Besides GVFS, there are other virtual file systems using the FUSE interface. Remote files are mounted locally through FUSE and TRAMP uses this locally mounted directory internally. When possible, TRAMP maps the remote file names to their respective local file name, and applies the file name operation on them. For some of the file name operations this is not possible, TRAMP emulates those operations otherwise.

rclone

The program rclone allows to access different system storages in the cloud, see https://rclone.org/ for a list of supported systems. If the rclone program isn’t found in your PATH environment variable, you can tell TRAMP its absolute path via the user option tramp-rclone-program.

A system storage must be configured via the rclone config command, outside Emacs. If you have configured a storage in rclone under a name ‘storage’ (for example), you could access it via the remote file name

/rclone:storage:/path/to/file

User names are part of the rclone configuration, and not needed in the remote file name. If a user name is contained in the remote file name, it is ignored.

Internally, TRAMP mounts the remote system storage at location /tmp/tramp.rclone.storage, with storage being the name of the configured system storage.

The mount point and optional flags to the different rclone operations could be passed as connection properties, See Setup of rclone method.

Access via rclone is slow. If you have an alternative method for accessing the system storage, you should use it. GVFS-based external methods for example, methods gdrive and nextcloud.

sshfs

On local hosts which have installed the sshfs client for mounting a file system based on sftp, this method can be used, see https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs/blob/master/README.rst/. If the sshfs program isn’t found in your PATH environment variable, you can tell TRAMP its absolute path via the user option tramp-sshfs-program.

All remote files are available via the local mount point. TRAMP aids in mounting the file system if it isn’t mounted yet. The remote file name syntax is

/sshfs:user@host#port:/path/to/file

User name and port number are optional. This method does not support password handling, the file system must either be mounted already, or the connection must be established passwordless via ssh keys.

The mount point and mount arguments could be passed as connection properties, See Setup of sshfs method.