Make elasticsearch only return certain fields?

I’m using elasticsearch to index my documents.

Is it possible to instruct it to only return particular fields instead of the entire json document it has stored?

Yep, Use a better option source filter. If you’re searching with JSON it’ll look something like this:

{
    "_source": ["user", "message", ...],
    "query": ...,
    "size": ...
}

In ES 2.4 and earlier, you could also use the fields option to the search API:

{
    "fields": ["user", "message", ...],
    "query": ...,
    "size": ...
}

This is deprecated in ES 5+. And source filters are more powerful anyway!