I want some clients to be unable to subscribe to some topics in Redis pubsub. Is this possible with redis acl?
Yes, this is how you can use ACL to limit a client only to the "foo" topic:
$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> ACL SETUSER limitedpubsub on nopass -@all +subscribe|foo
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> AUTH limitedpubsub ""
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> SUBSCRIBE bar
Reading messages... (press Ctrl-C to quit)
(error) NOPERM this user has no permissions to run the 'subscribe' command or its subcommand
^C
$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379> AUTH limitedpubsub ""
OK
127.0.0.1:6379> SUBSCRIBE foo
Reading messages... (press Ctrl-C to quit)
1) "subscribe"
2) "foo"
3) (integer) 1