Something I often did with the copy plugin is say "take the contents of this source and place it in <subdir>". That looked like this: parts: using-copy: plugin: copy source: /my/tarball.tar files: '*': subdir/ That would then extract /my/tarball.tar and place its contents in subdir/ . However, there's no reliable way to get the same behavior out of organize. Take this YAML for example: name: my-snap-name version: '0.1' summary: my summary description: my description grade: devel confinement: devmode parts: part1: plugin: dump organize: '*': subdir/ prepare: &prepare | mkdir -p $SNAPCRAFT_PART_INSTALL/subdir touch $SNAPCRAFT_PART_INSTALL/file_in_root touch $SNAPCRAFT_PART_INSTALL/subdir/file_in_subdir part2: plugin: dump organize: '*': different-subdir/ prepare: *prepare Run `snapcraft part2` and you'll see that this works exactly the same way as the copy plugin. It takes the entire tree and places it within a new directory called `different-subdir`. However, now run `snapcraft part1`. You'll see this doesn't work right at all. It has both `file_in_root` and `file_in_subdir` contained within `subdir/`, thus changing the tree completely. This is due to he fact that the directory into which the organize is supposed to be happening is named the same as a directory that already exists in the source. It'd be nice if the behavior was a little more consistent, and we could get equivalent behavior from the dump plugin as from the copy plugin. As it is, for this very reason, I continue to use the copy plugin.