Your Filesystem's Best Friend

Mount a folder from a remote server and use it like it's local — over the public internet, no VPN.

gMountie makes a remote directory behave like a local folder — built for the internet, not the LAN. A gmountie serve process exposes folders as named volumes; a gmountie mount client mounts one over FUSE and proxies every filesystem call to the server over gRPC. No VPN, no sync, no copying everything to disk first.

Accessing files on a server across the internet usually means a VPN plus NFS/SMB (brittle once real latency shows up), or a sync tool that copies everything first. gMountie goes for the NFS feel — a real, live mounted filesystem — but designed for the internet from day one:

• 🚫 No VPN. It's just a TLS gRPC connection. Expose the port or put it behind a reverse proxy, and mount from anywhere.
• 🔌 It survives the network. Sessions and idempotent RPCs mean a dropped connection, an ISP IP change, or a server restart won't kill your mount or your open files — they reconnect and resume.
• ⚡ Reads get cheap after the first one. A persistent client cache — in memory and on disk, kept fresh by server push — means re-reading a file doesn't cross the wire again.
• 📦 One small binary. The same gMountie is both the server and the client.

Where gMountie sits next to the usual ways of mounting remote storage:

_{Full matrix, including Tailscale Drive, and "when each makes sense" → docs: comparison.}

The server (Linux only) just exposes folders. The client mounts via FUSE: install fuse3 (/dev/fuse) on Linux, or macFUSE / FUSE-T on macOS.

# Build from source (Go 1.2x) — gives you both the server and the client
git clone https://github.com/gMountie/gMountie && cd gMountie
go build -o gmountie ./cmd

Zero-config: run gmountie serve with no arguments. On first start it writes ~/.config/gmountie/server.yaml (binding 0.0.0.0:9449), creates a shared volume, and prints a random admin password once — copy it.

server:
  address: 0.0.0.0
  port: 9449
auth:
  type: basic
  users:
    - username: admin
      password_hash: $argon2id$v=19$m=19456,t=2,p=1$...   # output of: gmountie genpass
volumes:
  - name: shared
    path: /srv/shared        # the folder to expose

gmountie serve -c server.yaml

mkdir -p ~/mnt/shared
gmountie mount admin@your-server.example:9449/shared ~/mnt/shared
# Password: (the one printed on first server run)

# ...and use it like any other folder:
ls ~/mnt/shared

The password resolves from --password, then the config file, then $GMOUNTIE_AUTH_PASSWORD, then an interactive no-echo prompt.

# See what the server exposes before mounting:
gmountie ls admin@your-server.example:9449

# Mount in the background (detach once ready):
gmountie mount admin@your-server.example:9449/shared ~/mnt/shared --daemon

# The classic flag form still works:
gmountie mount ~/mnt/shared -s your-server.example:9449 -n shared -u admin

For TLS pinning (TOFU), reverse proxies, and the full client.yaml reference, see docs.gmountie.dev.

     your machine                                   remote server
┌─────────────────────┐       gRPC over HTTP/2     ┌─────────────────────┐
│   gmountie mount    │ ◀────────────────────────▶ │   gmountie serve    │
│  FUSE mount point   │  metadata · data · events  │  real folders       │
│  + local cache      │      (TLS, Snappy)         │  exposed as volumes │
└─────────────────────┘                            └─────────────────────┘

The client implements a FUSE filesystem and turns each syscall into a gRPC call against the server, which serves it from the volume's real directory. Metadata, file data, and cache-invalidation events travel over separate gRPC services, so they can be tuned independently.

Dig deeper: Architecture & Protocol · Caching & Consistency · Performance

Full docs live at docs.gmountie.dev. Highlights:

• Quick Start · Compared to NFS / sshfs / rclone
• Architecture & Protocol · Caching & Consistency · Performance
• Configuration & CLI — server · client · Roadmap

Contributions of every kind are welcome — 🐛 bug reports, 💡 feature ideas, 📝 docs, and 🔧 code. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get set up, and SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability privately.

gMountie is open source under the Apache License 2.0.

Happy mounting! 🎉

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