Set against the backdrop of rapid urbanization in China, urban ecological environment suffers the elevated pressure of high-intensity human activities and unreasonable land development. Since urban ecological environment has been raised as an issue in relation to regionally ecological security, it is important to construct ecological security pattern and accordingly simulate the urban sprawl as a way to satisfy the requirements of both urban development and environment protection. Taking the Urban Agglomeration of Min Delta (Xiamen-Zhangzhou-Quanzhou) as the study area, this paper provides three scenarios of ecological security pattern, namely, basic security pattern, intermediate security pattern, and optimal security pattern. Basic security pattern represents that the protected area will not be occupied by built-up land use. Both intermediate security pattern and optimal security pattern locate the transition area between urban area and the protected area with the potential to be transformed into urban built-up area on the prerequisite that the urban ecological environment and urban ecosystem cannot be jeopardized. Compared to intermediate security pattern, the optimal security pattern covers the areas closer to urban area to security the ecological environment to the greatest extent. In the process of constructing the three scenarios of ecological security pattern, grounded in the theory of landscape security, by using a set of spatial analytic approaches in ArcGIS platform, we incorporate four aspects, including water safety, biological safety, geological safety and recreation safety to establish a comprehensive evaluation of ecological security. In addition, drawing on the SLEUTH model, we simulate three types of urban growth from 2015 to 2030, in which the three scenarios of ecological security pattern are combined to form three levels (i.e. low, medium, high) of eco-constraints. The results show that the area of basic security pattern is 9305.51 km², while intermediate security pattern is 7576.28 km² and optimal security pattern turns out 3482.73 km². The three patterns account for 36.89%, 30.03% and 13.81% of the total area of the Min Delta urban agglomeration, respectively. In terms of simulation modelling results, it shows that under all three scenarios of ecological pattern, urban area will keep growing by 2030 but the growth rate will be lower than the historical records. Under high level of eco-constraints, both urban growth area and urban growth rate are smaller than the other two settings of constraints. This reveals that ecological security pattern, as urban growth constraint, should be considered in our spatial planning to enhance the protection of urban ecological environment and prevent unreasonable urban sprawl. We argue our research is important to better inform urban planner on (re)designating urban growth boundary with the capacity of providing reliable technical support and scientific basis.