In the paper, we first develop a novel automatically energy-preserving scheme (AEPS) for the undamped and unforced single and multi-coupled Duffing equations by recasting them to the Lie-type systems of ordinary differential equations. The AEPS can automatically preserve the energy to be a constant value in a long-term free vibration behavior. The analytical solution of a special Duffing–van der Pol equation is compared with that computed by the novel group-preserving scheme (GPS) which has fourth-order accuracy. The main novelty is that we constructed the quadratic forms of the energy equations, the Lie-algebras and Lie-groups for the multi-coupled Duffing oscillator system. Then, we extend the GPS to the damped and forced Duffing equations. The corresponding algorithms are developed, which are effective to depict the long term nonlinear vibration behaviors of the multi-coupled Duffing oscillators with an accuracy of O(h4) for a small time stepsize h.