GitHub is a hosting service for computer code and other resources managed by the Git version control and source code management system. It provides collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for hosted projects.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cloud-based object storage through a web service interface. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. S3 objects, which may be structured in any way, are stored in resources called buckets.

GitHub has a REST API that you can use to get information about projects, repositories, pull requests, and just about every other kind of data GitHub stores. For example, to get information about an issue, you would issue the call GET /repos/:owner/:repo/issues/:number.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
  "id": 1,
  "node_id": "MDU6SXNzdWUx",
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347",
  "repository_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World",
  "labels_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347/labels{/name}",
  "comments_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347/comments",
  "events_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347/events",
  "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347",
  "number": 1347,
  "state": "open",
  "title": "Found a bug",
  "body": "I'm having a problem with this.",
  "user": {
    "login": "octocat",
    "id": 1,
    "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
    "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
    "gravatar_id": "",
    "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
    "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers",
    "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}",
    "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}",
    "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
    "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions",
    "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs",
    "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos",
    "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}",
    "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events",
    "type": "User",
    "site_admin": false
  },
  "labels": [
    {
      "id": 208045946,
      "node_id": "MDU6TGFiZWwyMDgwNDU5NDY=",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/labels/bug",
      "name": "bug",
      "description": "Something isn't working",
      "color": "f29513",
      "default": true
    }
  ],
  "assignee": {
    "login": "octocat",
    "id": 1,
    "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
    "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
    "gravatar_id": "",
    "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
    "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers",
    "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}",
    "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}",
    "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
    "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions",
    "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs",
    "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos",
    "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}",
    "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events",
    "type": "User",
    "site_admin": false
  },
  "assignees": [
    {
      "login": "octocat",
      "id": 1,
      "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
      "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
      "gravatar_id": "",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat",
      "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
      "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers",
      "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}",
      "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}",
      "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
      "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions",
      "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs",
      "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos",
      "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}",
      "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events",
      "type": "User",
      "site_admin": false
    }
  ],
  "milestone": {
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/milestones/1",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/milestones/v1.0",
    "labels_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/milestones/1/labels",
    "id": 1002604,
    "node_id": "MDk6TWlsZXN0b25lMTAwMjYwNA==",
    "number": 1,
    "state": "open",
    "title": "v1.0",
    "description": "Tracking milestone for version 1.0",
    "creator": {
      "login": "octocat",
      "id": 1,
      "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
      "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
      "gravatar_id": "",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat",
      "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
      "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers",
      "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}",
      "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}",
      "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
      "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions",
      "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs",
      "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos",
      "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}",
      "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events",
      "type": "User",
      "site_admin": false
    },
    "open_issues": 4,
    "closed_issues": 8,
    "created_at": "2015-04-10T20:09:31Z",
    "updated_at": "2018-03-03T18:58:10Z",
    "closed_at": "2017-02-12T13:22:01Z",
    "due_on": "2016-10-09T23:39:01Z"
  },
  "locked": true,
  "active_lock_reason": "too heated",
  "comments": 0,
  "pull_request": {
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/pulls/1347",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/pull/1347",
    "diff_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/pull/1347.diff",
    "patch_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/pull/1347.patch"
  },
  "closed_at": null,
  "created_at": "2015-04-22T13:33:48Z",
  "updated_at": "2015-04-22T13:33:48Z",
  "closed_by": {
    "login": "octocat",
    "id": 1,
    "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjE=",
    "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
    "gravatar_id": "",
    "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat",
    "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/followers",
    "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/following{/other_user}",
    "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/gists{/gist_id}",
    "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
    "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/subscriptions",
    "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/orgs",
    "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/repos",
    "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/events{/privacy}",
    "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat/received_events",
    "type": "User",
    "site_admin": false
  }
}

Whew!

To upload files you must first create an S3 bucket. Once you have a bucket you can add an object to it. An object can be any kind of file: a text file, data file, photo, or anything else. You can optionally compress or encrypt the files before you load them.

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from the GitHub API and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new data?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, many of GitHub's API results include fields like created_at that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

S3 is great, but sometimes you want a more structured repository that can serve as a basis for BI reports and data analytics — in short, a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Azure Synapse Analytics, and To Panoply.