How to lock a view controller’s orientation using supportedInterfaceOrientations

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

At the project level you can configure which orientations your whole app should support, but sometimes you want individual view controllers to support a subset of those. For example, you might want most of your app to work in any orientation, but one part to work specifically in portrait.

To configure this, you need to override the supportedInterfaceOrientations property in your UIViewController subclass, returning whichever orientations you want. Probably the most common use for this is to support all orientations for iPads, but .allButUpsideDown on iPhone.

Here’s some example code doing just that:

override var supportedInterfaceOrientations: UIInterfaceOrientationMask {
    if UIDevice.current.userInterfaceIdiom == .phone {
        return .allButUpsideDown
    } else {
        return .all
    }
}