Hey, using automation api, is it possible to bake plugins into the binary so I don't have to install the plugin during the request?

Not really, plugins are expected to run as separate processes and might not even be written in the same language your using for automation api. What you could do is ship the plugin binaries with your app. The engine will use plugins binaries on the path before looking in the plugins directory.

Thank you, do you have an idea of a sensible way to include the binaries with my app. Is it something like pulumi install?

Download the binaries you want with

pulumi plugin install

and then copy the binaries for them from ~/.pulumi/plugins, and copy them with your application binary. Exactly how that looks depends on how your distributing your app.

Ahhh, I wasn't aware that pulumi always looks ~/.pulumi/plugins. out of curiosity is there anyway to modify where pulumi looks?

The environment variable PULUMI_HOME will change it, but it will affect other setting files as well.