Many of these steps come from this wonderful blog post here.

1. Follow steps one through six here for installing Nginx.
2. Install Java, either OpenJDK (#1) or Oracle Java (#2)

   1. apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

   2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
      apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

3. Test that Java is installed:

   java -version

4. Download the deb file for Elasticsearch (below is 1.3.2, make sure you get the most recent one from the official location)

   wget https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.3.2.deb

5. Install the deb file

   dpkg -i elasticsearch-1.3.2.deb

6. Set Elasticsearch to start on boot

   sudo update-rc.d elasticsearch defaults 95 10

7. Start Elasticsearch

   sudo service elasticsearch start

8. Test to see if it is running. NOTE: Elasticsearch sometimes takes a couple of seconds to spin up. If you get a message saying Failed to connect to localhost port 9200: Connection refused wait a couple of seconds and try again.

   curl localhost:9200

9. Secure Elasticsearch to only allow local connections

   sudo vi /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml

   1. Comment out (if they aren’t already) these two lines:

      #network.bind_host: #some_value
      #network.publish_host: #some_other_value 

   2. Uncomment and set this line:

      network.host: localhost

10. Restart elasticsearch

    sudo service elasticsearch restart

11. For Nginx we’re just going to modify the default site

    sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

12. Replace everything with the below, changing example.com with your domain

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name example.com;
        location / {
            rewrite ^/(.*) /$1 break;
            proxy_ignore_client_abort on;
            proxy_pass http://localhost:9200;
            proxy_redirect http://localhost:9200 http://example.com/;
            proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header  Host $http_host;
        }
    }