In some use cases you would want a background image or color over the whole canvas. There is no built-in support for this, the way you can achieve this is by writing a custom plugin.
In the two example plugins underneath here you can see how you can draw a color or image to the canvas as background. This way of giving the chart a background is only necessary if you want to export the chart with that specific background.
For normal use you can set the background more easily with CSS(opens new window).
const data ={labels:['Red','Blue','Yellow'],datasets:[{label:'My First Dataset',data:[300,50,100],backgroundColor:['rgb(255, 99, 132)','rgb(54, 162, 235)','rgb(255, 205, 86)'],hoverOffset:4}]};
// Note: changes to the plugin code is not reflected to the chart, because the plugin is loaded at chart construction time and editor changes only trigger an chart.update().const plugin ={id:'customCanvasBackgroundColor',beforeDraw:(chart, args, options)=>{const{ctx}= chart;
ctx.save();
ctx.globalCompositeOperation ='destination-over';
ctx.fillStyle = options.color ||'#99ffff';
ctx.fillRect(0,0, chart.width, chart.height);
ctx.restore();}};
const data ={labels:['Red','Blue','Yellow'],datasets:[{label:'My First Dataset',data:[300,50,100],backgroundColor:['rgb(255, 99, 132)','rgb(54, 162, 235)','rgb(255, 205, 86)'],hoverOffset:4}]};
// Note: changes to the plugin code is not reflected to the chart, because the plugin is loaded at chart construction time and editor changes only trigger an chart.update().const image =newImage();
image.src ='https://www.chartjs.org/img/chartjs-logo.svg';const plugin ={id:'customCanvasBackgroundImage',beforeDraw:(chart)=>{if(image.complete){const ctx = chart.ctx;const{top, left, width, height}= chart.chartArea;const x = left + width /2- image.width /2;const y = top + height /2- image.height /2;
ctx.drawImage(image, x, y);}else{
image.onload=()=> chart.draw();}}};