Elasticsearch: how to exclude fields in a query

While querying Elasticsearch, sometimes you might want to exclude certain large fields from the response.

To exclude specific fields in an Elasticsearch query, use source filtering:

GET /_search
{
    "_source": {        
        "exclude": ["description"]
    },
    "query" : {
        "term" : { "country" : "france" }
    }
}

You can also do source filtering using a GET parameter.

curl "localhost:9200/<index>/_doc/1?_source_excludes=description"

NOTE: you can also include only specific fields in a search response.