I am setting up a small elasticsearch cluster and one of the nodes does not get any shards. It works, is part of the cluster - just empty (eu2 in the screenshot of head below):
This node is a worker, the only difference in the configuration vs. the other nodes are the lines
node.master: false
node.data: true
Is there a specific action which needs to be taken in order to have it populated with shards?
Try forcing a shard to move to the node in question.
If it does and sticks there, check your your shard allocation settings.
If it doesn't, check the logs to see why it won't go.