How to make a UIView fill the screen using Auto Layout anchors

Written by Paul Hudson    @twostraws

You can make one view fill all available space inside another by pinning all four of its anchors to the same anchors in its parent container. If you use this when the parent container is the view for your view controller, your child view will fill the screen.

Although it takes only four lines of code, this is the sort of thing I’d put into an extension:

extension UIView {
    func pinEdges(to other: UIView) {
        leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: other.leadingAnchor).isActive = true
        trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: other.trailingAnchor).isActive = true
        topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: other.topAnchor).isActive = true
        bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: other.bottomAnchor).isActive = true
    }
}

You can now call pinEdges(to: someOtherView) directly on the view you want to adjust.

Available from iOS 9.0

Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!

Tweet

Other people are reading…

• How to show and hide a toolbar inside a UINavigationController
• How to give UITableViewCells a selected color other than gray
• How to use IBInspectable to adjust values in Interface Builder
• How to move to the next UITextField when the user presses return
• How set different widths for a UISegmentedControl's elements

About the Swift Knowledge Base

This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.