Today at PHP[World] I had the opportunity to share something very exciting with my new friends in the PHP Community. I announced the availability of PHP7 RC7 x86 on Azure App Service Web App.

With today’s announcement, you are now able to install a Site Extension into your Azure Web App which properly configures PHP7 in the FastCGI pipeline within IIS as well as PHP7 on the command-line in the Console available in the Tools menu of a Web App in the Preview Portal (or the kudu debug console). The code for the PHP7 Site Extension is available on GitHub under an MIT License.

The support for PHP7 is provided as an experimental feature, which is considered unsupported at a Platform level as PHP7 is still currently in a release candidate state. What this does enable you to do is to start testing PHP7 to be able to provide feedback to both the PHP Community; as well as the Azure Web Apps team. Your feedback is vital while we work towards implementing a supportable feature which will be available after an official release of PHP7 is available. To provide feedback to the Azure Web App team use the Feedback forum.

To make this process easier for those of you who may be new to Azure App Service, or prefer to spin up an environment which is ready for the task at hand; you are able to use the deploy to Azure button below to create a new Web App Environment with the PHP7 Site Extension already enabled, which will contain a very simple index.php which displays the PHP Info.

Click on the button below, then sign into your Azure Subscription to deploy your new (Free) Web App directly into your account. Don't have a subscription? Sign up for a free trial!