Babel-node: one await works, more than one doesn't; breaks with SyntaxError: Unexpected token

Question

I have a script that I run with babel-node and it works with one await in it, but when I add another await , it throws a SyntaxError: Unexpected token error that looks something like this:

SyntaxError: C:/Users/User/Documents/thing/updateFirebase.js: Unexpected token (73:12)
    [0m  71 |                                      [31m'votes'[39m[1m:[22m [35m0[39m
  72 |                          [32m}[39m[1m;[22m
> 73 |                          await writeNewData[94m[1m([22m[39mcard[1m.[22mname[1m,[22m newData[1m,[22m newEditionArrayId[94m[1m)[22m[39m[1m;[22m
     |             ^
  74 |                  [32m}[39m
  75 |                  [32m}[39m
  76 |                  [36melse[39m [32m{[39m [90m

I'm using Firebase's realtime database and my first await is simply waiting to get a chunk of data:

let snapshot = await dbRef.once('value');

Then I do a bunch of other stuff, go into a loop and do this:

await writeNewData(book.name, newData, newEditionArrayId);

And this is the called function:

function writeNewData(name, object, arrayId) {
    var localMidRef = Firebase.database().ref(name + "/editions/"+ arrayId);
    console.log("writing new data to "+name);
    return localMidRef.set(object);
}   

I assume set() works asynchronously, since you can pass it a callback (I haven't found any documentation in Firebase's docs on it to prove otherwise...). But I can't understand why the damn await keyword screws up the parsing on the second usage, and not the first.

My .babelrc file:

{
  "presets": ["es2015", "react"],
  "plugins": ["syntax-async-functions","transform-regenerator"]
}

If I put stage-0 in there it all stops working.

Answer 1

First fix your prompt to show ANSI colors instead of the escape codes, so we don't have to guess where the error was. https://serverfault.com/questions/106028/how-to-enable-ansi-escape-codes-in-windows-cmd

You can also do a simple isolated test with await and babel to make sure that isn't the problem.