I don't want to use berks in production because I don't like the idea of nodes going out to the web to pull cookbooks (I only want them to pull them from the Chef server in the normal way). But I like using Berks for local development because it resolves the dependencies for kitchen for me.
I was thinking about just adding berksfile and berksfile.lock to gitignore, but I figured I'd ask if it is possible to accomplish this with berks without removing it from production.
"nodes" will never go to the internet looking for cookbooks, they'll always be sourced from the chef server, so.... The question back is: how do you propose to deliver cookbooks to the chef server used to manage your production nodes?
What most people appear to do is commit the Berkshelf lock file and just run a "berks apply" against the target chef server. That will most likely fit your needs.
Personally, I like better separation between development and my production/non-production systems. I create a release tarball containing all the cookbooks that I've tested in development, using the "vendor" command in Berkshelf, and store this binary in a revision control system like Nexus. I suspect many would consider this over-kill, but it enables me to deliver an off-line (no internet connection required) and traceable delivery of my configuration.