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I have a machine on which I wish to mount multiple remote servers to access them all centrally. For remote Linux based systems I am using SSHFS which works fine. But for Windows systems, or systems without SSH, they all have some form of HTTP server installed sharing the files (so they all have directory browsing enabled).

Can I mount a HTTP server as a local file system like SSHFS, so I can have all these remote servers mounted locally and presented in a uniform manner?

You can do this using WebDAV. This is an HTTP extension that is supported by most web servers, including IIS and Apache. WebDAV can be mounted in linux via the davfs2 FUSE module.

The problem with plain HTTP is that its just for retrieving content. There's no concept of folder or file list.

Some web servers let you browse directory structures by generating nice HTML pages with links to files for directories. And at least things like lftp are able to parse some of the common formats those indexes are generated as and give you the impression that it is a file transfer protocol, but it's not really, and I don't know of any fuse file systems that can parse indexes the way lftp does.

DAV is an extension that just does that and is already covered by jordanm's answer.

But note that if you don't need to list directories, avfs at least can let you access web pages over the filesystem.

$ mkdir AVFS
$ avfsd AVFS
$ grep -w Reputation 'AVFS/#http:unix.stackexchange.com|users|12583|javano'
 <span class="count">731</span> Reputation

Now also note that you can install sshd (via cygwin) or a FTP or Apache with DAV on a Windows machine as well, so you should be able to do the same things as you do on Unix machines.

the main issue already covered above is: directory/tree listing.

Although your question is quite old and you might have done otherwise, I have recently written a fuse filesystem that does exactly what you need, provided you write a little script to give it the "tree" of URLs.

It is there : https://gitlab.com/BylonAkila/astreamfs

You have an example script for the provider 1fichier, which you can adapt to your own personal server. What the script does is only prepare all the arguments for astreamfs, so that the mount will show all your files and folders in the right place. It does so with the (in)famous "web scraping" technique, aka reading HTML pages and extracting relevant parts from that.

There are still two major constaints, obviously, compared to regular mounts like NFS or SSHFS:

• The http server needs to handle 'ranges' (most servers can do that)


• It is read-only!