I ran into some problems running elasticsearch on a debian-based container, a combination of not being able to find log files and not being able to run as root. But even symlinking the config files didn't work for me. I was able to get it running and thought it might be helpful for somebody.
I installed elasticsearch with this command:
wget -qO - https://packages.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | apt-key add - \
&& echo "deb http://packages.elastic.co/elasticsearch/2.x/debian stable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elasticsearch-2.x.list \
&& apt-get update \
&& apt-get install -y elasticsearch \
&& update-rc.d elasticsearch defaults 95 10