When I'm working on the last revisions of a site, I normally make several small corrections and changes to several pages that are ready to deploy. What I normally do is open my FTP program. Download the file I want to work with, open the desired program, make the changes, save it, and then upload it one more time In general the process is not difficult, but it can be time consuming to have to do it constantly.

Recently I discovered a new way to do this kind of work: Mount your FTP as a local drive. Whit this method it’s much easier and fast, and at the same time it lets you work with any software you have on your computer.

By mounting your FTP as a local drive you have several advantages:

• You can easily navigate to your FTP account.
• You can open a file using all the software you have in your computer.
• To “upload” the file, you just need to save it, because you are working directly with the FTP account.
• There are many text editors that can open the entire folder of your project to easily move between tabs.

Please note that FTP has not been designed to be used like this. Browsing file systems with file manager while using file preview can cause an extremely high server load.

Mount FTP in Mac

Transmit is an excellent FTP client. It also works with SFTP, S3 (Amazon.com file hosting) and iDisk/WebDAV. It has a nice interface, very similar to the Finder, and it has one amazing option. With just one click (and your admin password) you can turn any kind of FTP or external account into a local drive.

• Go to your Favorite connections
• Click on Mount Favourite Disk
• A new disk will appear together with all your drives.
• You can access your FTP account directly through the Finder.
• You can close the program, and the disk will remain active.

Mount FTP in Windows

Windows let's you map your FTP account and have it accessible in your networks, but that is not helpful in some cases.

NetDrive is one of the best freeware programs to mount both FTP and WebDav as a local drive. Once you mount the local drive, you don't need to run an application or an FTP client interface but a simple drag-and-drop in your Windows Explorer will be sufficient to transfer and manage files.

To mount a new Drive you just need to:

• Give it a name
• Enter the IP address or URL
• Enter the port
• Assign a drive letter
• Enter login credentials
• Once the drive is connected it will appear in My Computer, together with other Local Drives.

Mount FTP in Linux

To Mount your FTP in Linux, you need to use CurlFtpFS; a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.

The first thing you need to do is to get the program curlftpfs

• sudo apt-get install curlftpfs

To mount the content of your ftp server at ftp.yourdomain.com in the directory ~/ftpfolder/ simply issue the command

• sudo curlftpfs -o allow_other ftp://username:password@ftp.yourdomain.com localdir

Unmounting is done in the usual way

• sudo umount ~/ftpfolder/

You can also have this drive mounted automatically at the beginning of your session. In order to do that, just edit the file fstab which deals with the mounting of all the devices on your computer and add the following to a new line:

• curlftpfs#calvin: ftp://username:password@ftp.yourdomain.com /mnt/ftpserver fuse allow_other,rw,user,noauto 0 0

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