How can i access the /var/www folder from VM instance (SSH console) in Google Cloud?

Question

i'm asking for help on an issue I've been having while getting some VM instances/servers back online. the problem is that a person who was working before at our company, set up the VM instances before, left us some documentation, where it ask us to Go to Google Cloud -> Compute Engine -> VM Instances and find 2 VM instances called "gap-mongo" and "gap-node".

When we went into Compute Engine -> VM Instances, nothing was there (seems like the instances got removed or moved somewhere else, but we can't see it in our VM instance list), So we decided to start creating a new the 2 VM instances ("gap-mongo" and "gap-node") from scratch and follow the documentation provided.

I got to a stage where i need to reference some repositories that according to the documentation, lives in "root@gap-node:/var/www#" folder, but i have not been able to access it, as i tried by just using cd var/www command, and it told me the folder didn't exist, so i as soon as i saw that, i just decided to use the mkdir command on the prompt to create the /var/www destination.

However the result i got, is this path "root@gap-node:~/var/www#" and not this one "root@gap-node:/var/www#". so i believe because of that is that i'm not being able to execute the next steps on the documentation, which are using 3 "git remote -v". And I'm not being able to use the commands, because when i use them it displays error: "bash: git: command not found"

I have the theory that the issue is related to the "~" symbol difference on the commands, as according to the documentation provided, we would only need to execute the "root@gap-node:/var/www# git remote -v" commands.

I'm not really sure what i'm missing, so i decided to post this, in order to get some help from you guys, as apparently Technical support for GCP needs to be paid and is not available for my user.