qgis - Seg Faults and Instantiation Errors while running PyQGIS on OS X

I'm having issues getting off the ground with running PyQGIS on my OS X. I'm frankly very confused as some errors occur sporadically while executing the same code.

When I try the following:

QgsApplication.setPrefixPath('/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS', True)
QgsApplication.initQgis()
QgsProviderRegistry.instance().providerList()

I either get one of three scenarios:

• Segmentation fault: 11 when returning the list


• A blank list returned


• 
  

  Or a this error after initQgis()...

  
  

  QCoreApplication::applicationDirPath: Please instantiate the QApplication object first QWidget: Must construct a QApplication before a QPaintDevice

  
  

A workaround I found to work is to instantiate a QgsApplication object first as the error suggests with something like

app = QgsApplication([], True)

However, the problem here is that this creates a GUI which I don't need - I'm just trying to do some scripting. If I change the instantiation parameter to False, then I get an error with initQgis() of:

QWidget: Cannot create a QWidget when no GUI is being used

Also, in a lot of examples I've found online you don't need the instantiation step... is there something funky with my setup?

I'm using a venv if that makes any difference... all commands I want to run work normally in the QGIS Python console, it's just the external script that's giving me issues.

Any thoughts?

Python: 2.7.10, QGIS: 2.10.1-Pisa, OS X: 10.10.3