Selenium grid with Chrome driver (WebDriverException: The path to the driver executable must be set by the webdriver.chrome.driver system property)

The driver executable needs to be avaiable physically on node machine. You can set the path to exe while starting the node

Add this line in the command

-Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=./chromedriver.exe

I configure this from json file and found that's little easier

json file with name DefaultNode.json

{
  "capabilities":
      [
        {
          "browserName": "firefox",
          "maxInstances": 5,
          "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver"
        },
        {
          "browserName": "chrome",
          "maxInstances": 5,
          "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver"
        },
        {
          "platform": "WINDOWS",
          "browserName": "internet explorer",
          "maxInstances": 1,
          "seleniumProtocol": "WebDriver"
        }
      ],
  "configuration":
  {
    "proxy": "org.openqa.grid.selenium.proxy.DefaultRemoteProxy",
    "maxSession": 5,
    "port": 5555,
    "host": ip,
    "register": true,
    "registerCycle": 5000,
    "hubPort": 4444,
    "hubHost": ip
  }
}

To start the node with json config

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar -role webdriver -nodeConfig DefaultNode.json -Dwebdriver.ie.driver=.\IEDriverServer.exe

Notice the IEDriverServer.exe is placed in same directory with json file

This works for me in 3.3.1 and above

java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver="C:\chromedriver.exe" -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.45.0.jar -role node -hub localhost:4444/grid/register -browser "browserName=chrome,version=ANY,platform=WINDOWS,maxInstances=20" -maxSession 20

Webdriver path should be placed before the -jar options