To install Ruby gems to your home directory rather than to the system-wide gems directory, a couple of environment variables need to by set/modified:
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH
Since our site's conversion from cfengine to Puppet, I have been wanting a sort of testing framework other than just putting things out on a test server and running a test Puppet agent against it. I found a good blog post by Patrick Debois describing a few testing methods for Puppet.