I’ve been a big fan of Elastic Search for a very long time. It’s a great piece of software that can be used as an object database as well as a search index. I realize
that’s not the intention of the software but it works so I’m happy. Elastic Search doesn’t have security built in so if you want to lock down your index (which is a good idea) then you’ll need to run it
behind a proxy. I briefly considered writing something in Go. There’s a node.js proxy for Elastic Search but it hasn’t been maintained in quite some time.
I want fewer moving pieces. Nginx provides basic authentication. I’m happy with that.
Digital Ocean is a new(ish) hosting company. They run on SSDs. They are pretty cheap and you can have a server running Docker in 55 seconds.
I’m happy with that.
Mix all the above and you get a nice bit of software that you can be happy with after you figure out the mixing part. It goes something like this:
Start
Setup an account on Digital Ocean and launch an instance running Docker.
Update Your Server
apt-get update
Use iptables to lock down the server
Add iptables-persistent
sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent
Copy iptables.rules file into /etc/iptables/rules.v4 (file contents below)
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]
[0:0] -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
[0:0] -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
[0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
[0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
[0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
[0:0] -A INPUT -j DROP
COMMIT
Update iptables rules
iptables-restore -c < /etc/iptables/rules.v4
Setup Authentication for nginx
Install tools for setting up users
sudo apt-get install -y apache2-utils
Setup directory
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/es
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/es_public
Add a user. You’ll be prompted for a password that you shouldn’t forget.
Setup a public user that can read data from Elastic Search
sudo htpasswd -c /var/www/es/.htpasswd public_username_goes_here
Setup an admin user that can write data to Elastic Search
sudo htpasswd -c /var/www/es/.htpasswd admin_username_goes_here
Docker
Setup directories
sudo mkdir /data
sudo mkdir /var/log/nginx
Install Elastic Search
docker pull dockerfile/elasticsearch
Run and name Elastic Search
The name will allow us to get information about the container from within our Nginx container that we’ll fire up next.
docker run -d --name elasticsearch -v /data:/data dockerfile/elasticsearch
Build nginx container – source for the docker image here in case you want to know what’s going on.
docker build -t="jbasdf/nginx_es" github.com/jbasdf/nginx_es
Run Nginx container
docker run -d -p 80:80 --link elasticsearch:elasticsearch -v /var/log/nginx:/var/log/nginx -v /var/www/es:/var/www/es jbasdf/nginx_es
You should now now be up and running. Test it using curl and make sure you get a response from Elastic Search:
curl -XGET --user public_username_goes_here:password_goes_here 'http://www.yourdomain.com'