jenkins sbt plugin does not have a working option to expand environment variables given thorough plugin parameters in jenkins. sooooooo - there is an evil bash wrapper for doing this ;o)

java--jenkins-sbt-env-hack.sh

#!/bin/sh

# 1. move java to create place for weapper
#   mv java java.bin
# 2. save this wrapper as 'java'
# 3. then use java as expected, wrapper just executes the moved original java binary
#   /opt/etnpol-sun-java-1.7.0-envhack/bin/java
# 4. for passing sbt arguments use env injecting from file created with this build bash script
#   echo "SBT_ARGS=\"jenkins-release release-version=$RELEASE_VERSION next-version=$NEXT_VERSION\"" > /tmp/some-tmp-file-blabla.tmp
# 5. in actions use
#   clean $SBT_ARGS
#

set -x
eval exec $(dirname $0)/java.bin "$@"