Git Empty Commit With No Changes

Question

I'm trying to troubleshoot a scenario that pops up, seemingly randomly, every couple of days or so.

I switch to a branch I haven't touched, and am told I am 'ahead' of the remote branch, despite not having made any commits on this branch. I then attempt to figure out what local changes I've made, and find none. In the past, doing a git push seems to resolve the issue, but it makes us extremely nervous to be blindly pushing who-knows-what willy-nilly without understanding the root issue. I've included below a command that I think illustrates my confusion. If I'm ahead of remote, shouldn't the git diff return my changes? I think I'm up-to-date with remote, which is what I'm trying to show with the inclusion of the git fetch/git pull commands.

  $ echo '====FETCH====' && git fetch && echo '====PULL====' && git pull && echo
'====STATUS====' && git status && echo '====DIFF====' && git diff && echo '====
DIFF ORIGIN/DEV====' && git diff origin/dev


====FETCH====
====PULL====
Already up-to-date.
====STATUS====
On branch dev
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/dev' by 1 commit.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

nothing to commit, working directory clean
====DIFF====
====DIFF ORIGIN/DEV====

Does anyone know what's going on here?

Answer 1

According to me it seems that its an merge commit by git. You can check the logs and check the comment against the commit. You can easily identify if its a merge commit or not.