How to set the tabs in a UITabBarController

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

If you're creating your tab bar controller from scratch, or if you just want to change the set up of your tabs at runtime, you can do so just by setting the viewControllers property of your tab bar controller. This expects to be given an array of view controllers in the order you want them displayed, and you should already have configured each view controller to have its own UITabBarItem with a title and icon.

If your tab bar controller is the root view controller of your window, you should be able to write something like this:

if let tabBarController = window?.rootViewController as? UITabBarController {
    let first = FirstViewController()
    let second = SecondViewController()

    tabBarController.viewControllers = [first, second]
}

Available from iOS 2.0 – see Hacking with Swift tutorial 7