Building object models around external data

If you want to use Django Model-like interface for your Github Issues, why don't use real Django models? You can, for example, create a method fetch in your model, that will load data from the remote api and save it to your model. That way you won't need to make external requests everywhere in your code, but only when you need it. A minimal example will look like these:

import requests
from django.db import models

from .exceptions import GithubAPIError


class GithubRepo(models.Model):
    api_url = models.URLField()  # e.g. https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World


class GithubIssue(models.Model):
    issue_id = models.IntegerField()
    repo = models.ForeignKey(GithubRepo, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    node_id = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255, null=True, blank=True)
    body = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)

    """
    Other fields
    """

    class Meta:
        unique_together = [["issue_id", "repo"]]

    @property
    def url(self):
        return f"{self.repo.api_url}/issues/{self.issue_id}"

    def fetch_data(self):
        response = requests.get(self.url)
        if response.status != 200:
            raise GithubAPIError("Something went wrong")

        data = response.json()

        # populate fields from repsonse
        self.title = data['title']
        self.body = data['body']

    def save(
        self, force_insert=False, force_update=False, using=None, update_fields=None
    ):
        if self.pk is None:  # fetch on first created
            self.fetch_data()
            super(GithubIssue, self).save(
                force_insert, force_update, using, update_fields
            )

You can also write a custom Manager for your model that will fetch data every time you call a create method - GithubIssue.objects.create()

The django way in this case would be to write a custom "db" backend.

This repo looks abandoned but still can lead you to some ideas.