Update (04-30-2012): paz has been combined with other tools into the WAZ-PHP-Utils project on Github. Please see there for further information.

These days PHP works well on Windows Azure, and there are some great tools available in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP that will help you build, package and deploy your applications. Even though there are some excellent tools available in the PHP SDK they still require a good amount of effort and complexity to properly get from your PHP application running locally in Windows Azure. With that in mind I set out to create a tool that takes the headache out of getting your existing PHP application off your hard drive and into Windows Azure with paz. paz is a simply packaging and deployment tool for PHP projects on Windows Azure. Simply give it the path to your project and let the magic happen. In a few short seconds you will have either a project running in a local Windows Azure development environment or a package ready to be  uploaded to Windows Azure itself. The following is an example of a command that will create a deployment package:

paz -in path/to/sources

After the command runs you will be able to find the package in path/to/sources/build.

paz is still in the infant stages but if you are doing work around Windows Azure with PHP I highly encourage you to check out this simple and easy to use tool. Send me some feedback on Github with bugs, likes, dislikes and feature requests. I also highly encourage you to read the tutorials put out by the Microsoft Interoperability Team about PHP on Windows Azure on the AzurePHP website

You can find documentation and sorce code for paz on the Github project page at http://github.com/blobaugh/paz

In this release paz does not provide the functionality to deploy that package it creates but there is hard work being done to implement it!