title: Swift 2.2 How to change background color of tab bar controller
body: <p>I've been trying to change the background of the tab bar, and have read many posts here in ObjC, many of them quite old. But I didn't find any for Swift, which is what I'm using.</p>
  
  <p>I finally figured out how to do it from code, so the tab bar colors can be changed with each theme color change. Here are the references that I used:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  override func viewWillAppear(animated: Bool) {
      // set tab bar background color, including the More tab
      self.tabBarController?.tabBar.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor()
    }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I put this code in the view controller for the first tab that appears when the app starts up, so that it gets run "first." It works fine as far as I can tell, even when I have 8 tabs and use the More... tab.</p>
  
  <p>And I bound the same code to buttons in various tabs, so I can change the tab bar color from anywhere in my code.</p>
  
  <p>But I confess that as a newbie, I'm not sure that's the best location to change the tab bar color. If this is the wrong place, please correct me.</p>
  
  <p>I post this code here since it would have saved me a few hours, and I hope that it can save someone else some (swift) time.</p>