Load YouTrack data to DuckDB

YouTrack is a project management and issue tracking software that provides a REST API to access and manage its data programmatically. Everything needed to build a working YouTrack → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your YouTrack to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from YouTrack to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the YouTrack API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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YouTrack API at a glance

These values come from the YouTrack API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the YouTrack API?

Authentication is performed by including an Authorization header with a Bearer token formatted as 'Bearer <permanent_token>'. Permanent tokens should be generated via the user profile in YouTrack.

1. Get your credentials

1. Log in to your YouTrack instance. 2. Click your avatar in the application header and select Profile. 3. Switch to the Account Security tab. 4. In the Tokens section, click the New token button. 5. Enter a name for the token, select the required access scopes (e.g., YouTrack), and click Create token. 6. Copy the generated permanent token immediately, as it cannot be viewed again once the dialog is closed.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.youtrack_source]
token = "perm:your_permanent_token_here"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What YouTrack data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the YouTrack endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new YouTrack records?

YouTrack exposes cursor on api/issues, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "issues", "endpoint": {
    "path": "api/issues",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "cursor", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated YouTrack pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading admin/projects and issues from the YouTrack API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def youtrack_source(token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "{YouTrack-Service-URL}/api",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": token},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "issues", "endpoint": {"path": "api/issues"}},
            {"name": "work_items", "endpoint": {"path": "api/workItems"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_youtrack_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="youtrack_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="youtrack_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(youtrack_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_youtrack_to_duckdb()

Run it with python youtrack_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query YouTrack data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("youtrack_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.issues.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM youtrack_data.issues LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the YouTrack to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw YouTrack loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load YouTrack data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack