Mounting an FTP folder

Recently I came across this very interesting utility – CurlFtpFS (curlftpfs.sourceforge.net/). It allows users to mount FTP sites as local folders. I had an inkling that something like this could be done but I never imagined that it would be this easy!

To mount ftp.subdomain.domain.org to /home/me/random_folder all you need to do is execute curlftpfs -o user=username:password ftp.subdomain.domain.org /home/me/random_folder. Of course curlftpfs allows for dozens of other options to completely customize what you want it to do.

One very nice use this concept can be put to is hosting a git repository on an ftp server in which you have an account. This is useful if only a handful of people need to access the repository and you do not wish to make the source code public on places like github. All you need is a free FTP account – once you have it you simply mount the server onto a local folder and initialize an empty repository in the folder. You can then push your commits onto the git repository. Practically speaking this will get problematic if multiple people want access to the repository at the same time but if the project involves only a small number of developers then this should not be a problem.