Problem with openVPN easy-rsa

following the openVPN tutoria and step two keeps failing on something that seems very elementary, which is that it seems unable to find the file path. the code and error:

./easyrsa init-pki
-bash: ./easyrsa: No such file or directory

things I’ve tried: accessing as a different user, accessing from a different folder (rather than the cd ~/easy-rsa), modifying the vars path (currently it’s only the two lines recommended:

set_var EASYRSA_ALGO "ec"
set_var EASYRSA_DIGEST "sha512"

but I’ve tried that at the bottom, that plus set_var EASYRSA_PKI “$EASYRSA/pki”, and others but nothing happens. I expect this is a super easy item that I’ve missed somewhere, because I can’t find any other stack overflow questions specifically on it, or the like. so if there’s an easy fix that you all expect I’m all ears. thanks kindly.