How to automate MAMP Pro virtual host creation thr

I'm writing a script to create virtual hosts in Mamp Pro. I want them to be created and appear in the GUI next to the normal ones I've created manually through the GUI. I've found the following questions on SO:

Automatic Virtual Hosts with MAMP Pro?
Add MAMP Pro Vhosts with script

Here are my findings, so far:

I've found out that the hosts appearing in the MAMP Pro GUI are found in: ~/Library/Application\ Support/appsolute/MAMP\ PRO/settings3.plist; I've tried editing it but I can't seem to get the entries right with the command PlistBuddy -c 'print ":virtualHosts"' settings3.plist which says Print: Entry, ":virtualHosts", Does Not Exist
From the second question I've listed above, I found out that I can edit the httpd.conf files (one found in user library and one in the root library) through the GUI.
The hosts file including all of the IP addressing is in /private/etc/hosts

The questions are dead, even though I commented on the latest one asking for an update on how he solved his scripting problem in the end.

In the end, I can easily add the values into the hosts file and the vhosts.conf files to make the website work. My only problem is getting it to show up in the list with the other virtual hosts in the MAMP Pro GUI.

Update: After further investigation and experimentation, I realized the process in which the virtual hosts are created; when I first create a host through the GUI, the settings3.plist file gets updated, when I hit "save" to save the changes, the hosts and httpd.conf files are updated accordingly. I understand that settings3.plist can be converted to an XML through plutil -convert xml1 -o - settings3.plist > test.txt and then edit it and convert it back to binary through plutil -convert binary -o - test.txt > settings3.plist.

My problem with that is that, even though I got the gist of how the CP$UID works in the XML formats, I cannot create a script to undestand the concept, check for the position of the values through the list, and then put in the values accordingly. I even asked a question about it here: https://stackoverflow.com/q/33775025/1934402

The solution provided in Automatic Virtual Hosts with MAMP Pro? refers to MAMP PRO version 2.x where host configuration is saved in settings.plist which is an XML format property list file while in MAMP PRO version 3.x host settings are stored in settings3.plist which is a binary format property list file.

Even in this format you should be able to do:

/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c Print settings3.plist

and still get the contents of the file. Your problem arises from the fact that virtualHosts is no longer there as you will see by running the above command. The above command output is not very helpful for understanding the structure of your plist file so you could run:

plutil -convert xml1 -o - settings3.plist > ~/settings3.plist.xml

and then work out the structure of ~/settings3.plist.xml in order to find out which keys to use in PlistBuddy commands. It is a good idea to check the manual pages for plist and PlistBuddy. Do note that key names have changed and the structure is not that clear even in the xml file.

I hope this helped. I will investigate further into it and modify this answer if I have a full recipe for editing host details.