It is quite new in Ivy, and it is not released yet, but there is a concept of "packaging" which can handle directories.
See the official documentation: http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/trunk/concept.html#packaging
With this feature, Ivy can handle by itself the unzipping of a folder. On the publish part, you are on your own, you'll have to make a zip yourself. On the retrieve part, Ivy will unzip the folder in the cache. So you will still have to do some process to copy it at the proper place.
It has not been tested, but probably you can go even further by implementing a custom unpacking algorithm, which will do the unpacking at the proper place. You'll have to implement a class which extends org.apache.ivy.core.pack.ArchivePacking
, and declare it in your ivysettings.xml, like this:
<ivysetting>
<classpath file="${ivy.settings.dir}/custom-packing.jar"/>
<typedef name="customPacking" classname="com.acme.ivy.CustomPacking" />
<customPacking />
</ivysettings>
And then in your ivy.xml, declare your artifact as packaged by your custom packaging name:
<ivy-module version="1.0">
...
<publications>
<artifact name="mydistrib" type="distrib" ext=".zip" packaging="my-custom-packaging" />
</publications>
</ivy-module>