Local Ruby Gem Dependencies

My work environment is very controlled. We validate certain
configurations of servers on our staging/QA servers before moving to
production. Before updates to gems that are different than our
validated version can be deployed we must first test them on the
staging and QA servers. As a result i’d like a better method to
control the versions of ruby gems that are installed on the server.
The best idea for this is to check local copies of gems into the
source repository and include these in the release (thus freezing a
versioned gem list). One thing i’ve noticed is that if you attempt to
install local gems gem cannot resolve local dependencies inside a
directory. So building a directory with all the gems and then running
“gem install *” or the flag "–include-dependencies"seems to not
work…
Am i going about this the wrong way? is there a way to get gem to
resolve local dependencies?
suggestions or recommendations? My experience with ruby is defiantly
limited so if i’m asking a stupid question please be nice…