Most of the Zowe CLI plug-ins have the parameter base_path that can be used to connect to APIs registered in Zowe API ML.

In such a case you specify the API gateway's hostname and port in the host and port parameters, and basePath is used to specify the path of the URL after port and before the endpoint path.

If I take an example from https://docs.zowe.org/stable/extend/extend-apiml/api-mediation-components-of-url/:

https://ca3x.ca.com:10310/cafilemasterplus/api/v1/mvs/dataSets/test/ping
\______/\_______________/\______________________/\_____________________/
scheme       host             basePath                  endpointPath
                          \______________/\__/\/
                            serviceId      t  v

\_______________________________________________/
                 baseUrl

basePath in this example is /cafilemasterplus/api/v1.

As a user, you need to know what part of the URL is exactly the base path and typical users are not sure if it should be https://ca3x.ca.com:10310/, https://ca3x.ca.com:10310/cafilemasterplus, cafilemasterplus/api/, or /cafilemasterplus/api/v1/.

The worse problem is that the version of the API needs to be specified by the end-user rather than by the CLI plug-in that is developed to work well specific version or set of versions. If a CLI plug-in will need to user api/v2 or api/v3 in the future, it will have to be edited by the end-user.

A possible solution is to accept serviceId as a recommended alternative for basePath. It will be easier for users to find out the correct value of serviceId since it is a single value and is displayed explicitly in the API Catalog. The CLI plug-in will construct the correct URL with the version that is needed for its functionality automatically.