For anyone wanting to take those first steps into running PHP applications on an Azure platform, you should check out a new post from Josh Holmes. He describes the process of getting it working from a command-line approach.

I thought we could kick it up a notch [from his previous post] and get PHP running in Azure leveraging the command line tools. The primary thing that we need to do is to copy the PHP bits up with the rest of your deployment and configure the FastCGI handler to know where the PHP interpreter can be found.

Once you get PHP installed testing it out is just a matter of getting his test page in the right directory, updating one of the configuration files (web.roleconfig), creating the Config/Definition files and packaging it all up with cspack. All of the contents for the sample configuration files and a screenshot of the fnal output are included.