Shared Folders

transient supports a mechanism for sharing host directories with a virtual machine. sshfs is the underlying sharing mechanism, which is a FUSE filesystem that uses ssh to perform the actual file transfer.

A shared folder can be created with a guest by specifying --shared-folder on the transient command line. This will cause the transient to perform a series of operations:

1. Establish an SSH connection with the guest
2. Use the guest's sshfs application to mount the requested host folder to the requested guest path, piping data between it and the host's sftp-server

This logic implies a few requirements for using shared folders in transient.

Requirements

Because transient directly runs the host's sftp server, it searches various standard locations for sftp-server. If the host's server has a nonstandard name or location, the argument --sftp-bin-name must be used to specify either an absolute path or a file name that resides in the system's PATH.

transient also requires that the guest image have sshfs installed. To build a guest image with sshfs pre-installed, see Building Images