Whenever I install phpmyadmin it installs to

root

instead of

var/www

Can anyone tell me why this is happening? I can fix it by moving the files but it's a weird one.

How are you installing PHPMyAdmin?

If you're downloading the PHPMyAdmin tarball from their website, it'll extract it to the current working directory. Once you've extracted it, if you move the folder to your webroot, you'll be able to access it then. Make sure you adjust the permissions accordingly.

You should install phpmyadmin from your distro's repositories to ensure that it gets updated with the rest of your software. For example, Ubuntu's copy of phpmyadmin will install into /var/www.