Chef-Cookbooks | Chef recipes with rbenv and Passenger Nginx | Runtime Evironment library

I wanted to ask what the best practice, and what is commonly done for testing and developing changes to cookbooks,environments,nodes, essentially the chef repo. Reason I ask this, is the current setup has one chef server. All environments (staging, beta, prod) use this server and have all the relevant info pulled from here.

However, when I want to make a change to a cookbook and test it on one of our staging environments...it pulls from this repo and I either have to make a mess of configuration changes or...upload a cookbook with a different name, test, and then proceed to rename my cookbook back to the original name. Far from efficient, and frustrating even.

I thought maybe I could have different git branches and somehow point them in different directions but it would still be pulling from the same repo I imagine..

My thought then was to simply have an entirely separate chef server dedicated for developing and testing, and point my staging environments to that chef server.

Not sure if there was another more simple way I was missing, thus why I'm asking the community.

This may seem related to another question I asked, but I hope the difference between these two questions is clear (How to update chef cookbooks in a developer workflow)