First of all I didn't know whether to provision my machine with root or not. Scraping through sysadmin resources I found people installing Ruby with the "deployer" user and people using root for that task. When I tried installing Ruby with deployer I got many permission errors, but I realize that was caused in large part by my lack of experience with sysadministration.
Also, running processes with runit as non-root requires extra [care][1] and I just wanted to get everything up and improve my scripts AFTER I knew that my setup was viable.
Edit
One more thing: I couldn't install ruby-shadow, which is needed to handle passwords with chef, due to some errors with the version of ruby I had.