Comment # 18 on bug 844198 from Howard Guo

Hello Joschi.

As far as I know /run/user/UID is best maintained by logind, which offers dbus
API for creating and destroying login sessions - however the systemd developers
advise against calling these APIs by an application that is not the systemd-pam
module.

loginctl enable-linger should definitely work in this particular case, but I do
not actually know what the best practice is for an application to trigger
creation of /run/user/UID via logind, or whether it is a good idea to do so.
Sorry.