Setting up LIRC in Debian 8

I have an infrared remote control which sends RC-5 signals and a computer with an IR receiver. The computer runs Debian 8 and I'm trying to set up LIRC so that I can control the music player daemon (MPD) with the remote. I have installed the lirc package and added a configuration file for RC-5 signals in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d/. The daemon seems to be active: $ systemctl status lirc.service ● lirc.service - LSB: Starts LIRC daemon. Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/lirc) Active: active (exited) since Sun 2016-01-31 20:18:17 CET; 32s ago Process: 408 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/lirc start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) However, when I try to test the remote control with irw it fails: $ irw connect: No such file or directory According to man irw this seems to be cause by the absence of the socket file /var/run/lirc/lircd. The directory /var/run/lirc is empty. Any clues would be greatly appriciated.