ately I have been using [Docker](http://docker.com) for development. It makes it really easy to stand up services and package entire stacks for projects. Most recently, I set up an elastic search instance, and the first thing I wanted to do was install the insanely helpful [Head](http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-head) and [Big Desk](http://bigdesk.org/) plugins. The official [elastic search Dockerfile](https://github.com/dockerfile/elasticsearch) is just elastic search, no plugins. And of course, containers are pretty much a black box. Every time it restart, everything is back to square one. Luckily, The image exposes a volume for persistent data, and that is all we really need to have to install plugins. Here