The Pulumi GitHub App does require that you use the “
app.pulumi.com” backend for your stack, and does not work with self-managed backends.
The reason this is the case, is that when installing the GitHub App, the Pulumi Service receives webhooks from GitHub informing us that the PR was created, and the current SHA, etc.
… so when the update completes, we can associate <stack update X> with <PR Y>.
When using the self-managed backend, it isn’t quite possible to make that work. However, you can approximate similar functionality by calling the GitHub APIs directly.
For example, I think we have a snippet or demo somewhere where a GitHub Actions workflow will check for the “current PR info” from and env var, and use the GitHub API to comment on the PR that triggered the GitHub Actions run.